While carrying on with Tom's story (1600s revenants & witchfinders), which is over halfway through, I've started muddling about with the Chimps on a Blimp story as the setting for a probably-YA novel. It's kind of relaxing to be able to move between stories, after the more-than-a-little intensive spells of revision of Willow Knot.
Tom's story is dead easy for world building, because it's Stuart England, barely tweaked. Sure, it has working magic, but since most people in 1600s England (and elsewhere) believed in magic, real magic doesn't change the society as much as one might think. I mean, there are legal and philosophical discussions about magic already in place.
With the short story (On the Transmontane Run With the Aerial Mail Express, plug, plug) I was able to do a fair bit of handwaving and 'quick, look over there!' to avoid setting-holes (like plot holes, but you can fall further and it's all mucky at the bottom) or at least direct attention away from unexamined areas. With a novel I can't do that nearly so much, just because the canvas is wider, and I'm not painting miniatures.
Also, there are things I will need to know about the world for my self, whether or not those aspects come directly into the story. What I'll need to know may not be what another writer in the same situation would need to know, and some of it I'll only realise as I write.
Obligatory link to Patricia Wrede's worldbuilding questions, both helpful and daunting.
The first and biggest question is: why no railroads? What makes airships commercially viable? In the short story the blimp travels over swamp and mountain, both difficult terrain for railways. But what about the plains? Do the rails run over the prairies, then stop as the foothills rise?
Then there's the weird ecology, the freshwater jellyfish that are a crucial plot point. And the flying squid, that don't show up in the short story, but might be real later on. I began to think longingly of Australia, and wonder about heaving some sort of Atlantis out of the sea, and supplying it with weird critters. Maybe I could crack North America down longways, put some massive waterway between prairies and Northwest coast.
I brought the question to the Scribblers, and bookherder said 'go and look at late Cretaceous maps'. Lo, there was the Western Interior Seaway, almost exactly as I'd pictured it.
Now I'm all excited, and need to find something like A Child's Illustrated Guide to Paleogeography, with fold-out maps. Research!
What happens if the prairies are covered with water? No giant buffalo herds, for one thing. How much of Europe should I allow? Does the land bridge last longer?
Such fun to come.
Showing posts with label fictional countries. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fictional countries. Show all posts
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Sunday, June 8, 2008
sheathe machete, take out hammer
I have cut just under 26k from a 129.5k manuscript. I'm torn between a euphoric sense of accomplishment, and grinding guilt that I let anybody--still less anybody I hold in affection--read 26 thousand unnecessary words.
I am so sorry. Really. I will never do it again. The gratitude part just makes me feel worse about it.
The next step is to re-enter at the first chapter and go through, pausing at the angle brackets to hammer home various elements that were scanted.
Clarifying the material culture of Nomency and environs--I hadn't considered that the default tech level for a fantasy is, say, 13th-15th c. Western Europe. Willow Knot, being a Grimm fairy tale (Grimm 11, Brother and Sister), is set in late 1700s Europe, roughly during Kleinstaaterei, something before the time the Grimms were collecting stories. This won't automatically occur to most readers, so I need to drop more clues about the material culture, earlier on.
Establishing that religion exists, without making religion a big honking issue. I've changed 'the Dear' to 'the Dear Lord' throughout, and hopefully that will do most of it. I can't count on an audience who know all the words to I Know Where I'm Going.* I'm still worried that US readers (okay, humour me briefly in the delusion that I will have readers I don't already know personally) see evangelical Protestantism as the model of religion good or bad, and will be bemused or unconvinced by any faith less insistent. But there is nothing I can do about that. For sure I can't write an equivalent to 1700s German states without religion. It would be like writing the European Middle Ages without religion--that gives you the Society for Creative Anachronism.
That was a joke, but never mind.
Clarifying why Myl is paranoid about being indebted. First to another person, because of Midame reminding her how grateful she should be, and how she owed her aunt obedience and affection--which is part of what messes up her relationship with Alard. Then to any creature in the Maerchenwald, because the stories are pretty clear that if you take without asking, or take without paying, the thing you took is going to bring you down. I can't assume that level of folktale knowledge in a reader, so it needs to be reiterated beyond the once or twice.
Laying in the clues of Midame's 'rescue' of the unborn child, via what Myl witnessed and partially remembers, which is also how she learned to hear spells running in water--this will be a tough series to complete without being either too obscure or clunkily obvious. If I can do it, it will wrap things up very tidily.
Establishing that Alard and Myl do not marry for love, and maybe clarifying that no one of their class and time would expect to.
Alard marries her out of guilt, in an attempt to set things right, to close the question of alliance with Lusantia, to get an heir, and to use her supposed gift for unsealing. He doesn't explain any of this to her, so establishing it is going to be more than a little difficult, working from her pov.
Myl marries him in hope of freeing Tyl from enchantment, to restore her family's estate, and because refusing the king is usually a bad idea.
I sure hope nobody reads this looking for a tale of True Love and Soulmates. They do love each other by the end, but--.
Laying in the groundwork for the plot against Alard, the example of the duke of Valdosa in his extravagance and how he finances it, and the resentment of Fadric and others that they can't use his method because Alard forbids it.
Concentrating the exiles subplot on Lusantia, with Valdosa being the impulse for the regicide subplot. It may still be too complicated, but I guess I'll find out.
Building Truda's manipulation of the ladies in waiting, which will be tricky because it happens out of Mylla's sight. I laid some clues in Donvina's outburst, but probably not strongly enough.
I've made it more obvious that Truda is the one who tells Alard about the sweetmeats--did anyone wonder why she was so quick on the spot after Alard told Myl off and went off in a huff? And why Mylla went into labour so soon after Truda's posset? Nobody commented on it, but maybe that means it was perfectly clear.
Simplifying Baldolf's aims. I was still working out what he wanted in the second draft, and by the end of it I knew, but if I'd gone back to trim out the false leads, I would have started rewriting the whole damn thing and it was time to step back.
Resolution: never let anyone see anything earlier than the 3d draft ever again.
Doubtless there's more - oh, the scene where Lina warns of the witchcraft rumours will be revised from a simple meeting in the garden to a full-out fight between two of the ladies-in-waiting, over one encouraging the extravagance mentioned above. I've realised that I will have two 'shower scenes' and a catfight, and an unplanned pregnancy. Exploitation fairy tale!
Anyway, Willow Knot draft 3 sits at 103.6k, and I figure I can go up to 110k while filling holes and polishing. Ideally I'll finish that process before our pre-technological Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill. That's the end of this month. Excuse me while I gird my loins.
*'I know where I'm going,
I know who's going with me.
I know who I love,
But the Dear knows who I'll marry'
I am so sorry. Really. I will never do it again. The gratitude part just makes me feel worse about it.
The next step is to re-enter at the first chapter and go through, pausing at the angle brackets to hammer home various elements that were scanted.
Clarifying the material culture of Nomency and environs--I hadn't considered that the default tech level for a fantasy is, say, 13th-15th c. Western Europe. Willow Knot, being a Grimm fairy tale (Grimm 11, Brother and Sister), is set in late 1700s Europe, roughly during Kleinstaaterei, something before the time the Grimms were collecting stories. This won't automatically occur to most readers, so I need to drop more clues about the material culture, earlier on.
Establishing that religion exists, without making religion a big honking issue. I've changed 'the Dear' to 'the Dear Lord' throughout, and hopefully that will do most of it. I can't count on an audience who know all the words to I Know Where I'm Going.* I'm still worried that US readers (okay, humour me briefly in the delusion that I will have readers I don't already know personally) see evangelical Protestantism as the model of religion good or bad, and will be bemused or unconvinced by any faith less insistent. But there is nothing I can do about that. For sure I can't write an equivalent to 1700s German states without religion. It would be like writing the European Middle Ages without religion--that gives you the Society for Creative Anachronism.
That was a joke, but never mind.
Clarifying why Myl is paranoid about being indebted. First to another person, because of Midame reminding her how grateful she should be, and how she owed her aunt obedience and affection--which is part of what messes up her relationship with Alard. Then to any creature in the Maerchenwald, because the stories are pretty clear that if you take without asking, or take without paying, the thing you took is going to bring you down. I can't assume that level of folktale knowledge in a reader, so it needs to be reiterated beyond the once or twice.
Laying in the clues of Midame's 'rescue' of the unborn child, via what Myl witnessed and partially remembers, which is also how she learned to hear spells running in water--this will be a tough series to complete without being either too obscure or clunkily obvious. If I can do it, it will wrap things up very tidily.
Establishing that Alard and Myl do not marry for love, and maybe clarifying that no one of their class and time would expect to.
Alard marries her out of guilt, in an attempt to set things right, to close the question of alliance with Lusantia, to get an heir, and to use her supposed gift for unsealing. He doesn't explain any of this to her, so establishing it is going to be more than a little difficult, working from her pov.
Myl marries him in hope of freeing Tyl from enchantment, to restore her family's estate, and because refusing the king is usually a bad idea.
I sure hope nobody reads this looking for a tale of True Love and Soulmates. They do love each other by the end, but--.
Laying in the groundwork for the plot against Alard, the example of the duke of Valdosa in his extravagance and how he finances it, and the resentment of Fadric and others that they can't use his method because Alard forbids it.
Concentrating the exiles subplot on Lusantia, with Valdosa being the impulse for the regicide subplot. It may still be too complicated, but I guess I'll find out.
Building Truda's manipulation of the ladies in waiting, which will be tricky because it happens out of Mylla's sight. I laid some clues in Donvina's outburst, but probably not strongly enough.
I've made it more obvious that Truda is the one who tells Alard about the sweetmeats--did anyone wonder why she was so quick on the spot after Alard told Myl off and went off in a huff? And why Mylla went into labour so soon after Truda's posset? Nobody commented on it, but maybe that means it was perfectly clear.
Simplifying Baldolf's aims. I was still working out what he wanted in the second draft, and by the end of it I knew, but if I'd gone back to trim out the false leads, I would have started rewriting the whole damn thing and it was time to step back.
Resolution: never let anyone see anything earlier than the 3d draft ever again.
Doubtless there's more - oh, the scene where Lina warns of the witchcraft rumours will be revised from a simple meeting in the garden to a full-out fight between two of the ladies-in-waiting, over one encouraging the extravagance mentioned above. I've realised that I will have two 'shower scenes' and a catfight, and an unplanned pregnancy. Exploitation fairy tale!
Anyway, Willow Knot draft 3 sits at 103.6k, and I figure I can go up to 110k while filling holes and polishing. Ideally I'll finish that process before our pre-technological Living History Week at Fort Rodd Hill. That's the end of this month. Excuse me while I gird my loins.
*'I know where I'm going,
I know who's going with me.
I know who I love,
But the Dear knows who I'll marry'
Thursday, April 12, 2007
research happy things
Alright, blogs are useful in one way. When I want to hop up and down and do the happy dance over some petty triumph of research or plotting or characterisation, and nobody in my real life is likely to do anything but say 'well, that's good' in a 'smile, nod, and hope she goes away' sort of voice, I can come here.
In the root story, Little Brother and Little Sister, the queen is done to death (it's unclear what happens to her body) in the following way:
Which looks like what? Where in the palace would it be? Steam bath or immersion? Water heated how? What's the floor made of? And so on.
Sure, I can go and look at Ingres, though his Turkish Bath is a bit more crowded than I think is plausible for the plot--in fact it's hard to make out the decor, so well-fleshed is the room. The Small Bather is likelier, if a more modest establishment.
I've been looking at a nice Victorian book advocating public bathhouses and laundry houses to improve hygiene in the cities. I've been looking at books of architecture. I was even courageous enough to google sauna and "bath house" and found a useful short history of the Finnish Sauna, with the following amusing notes:
Which is interesting, but doesn't necessarily help me. So back to the bookstacks, where today I was lucky. First I found Die Bauernhausformen im Baltischen Raum (Farmhouses in the Baltic, roughly) with lovely drawings of rustic saunas and bath-rooms (Badestube, here) both set in the earth like a root-cellar and combined with a summer kitchen in one long building. There's the bath-house on Midame's farm, that Myl can remember wistfully, to establish the idea of steam baths.
Then a guidebook to The Royal Palace of Visegrad, with complete floorplans (as far as excavated at the date of publication) including the stove, the fuel storage, the water supply and drainage, the two rooms, one the sudatorium, the other not cleared but probably cool baths.
As a backup, I have Whitehall Palace, by Simon Thurley, an account of the excavations, including a sunken pool (Charles II did all right by himself) and a possible steam bath heated by a huge ceramic-tiled stove.
So now I can get it right. And I'm probably going to steal Visegrad for Alard's palace, because why not? It had great plumbing. And add some 1700s decor, to bring it up to date.
I'm ludicrously close to 75k, and still have about half the plot for the court section to go. Some ruthless cutting to come, clearly, but not until all the first draft is done. Then I'll put it away for a couple of weeks and draw maps and floorplans.
In the root story, Little Brother and Little Sister, the queen is done to death (it's unclear what happens to her body) in the following way:
they carried the weakly Queen into the bath-room, and put her into the bath; then they shut the door and ran away. But in the bath-room they had made a fire of such deadly heat that the beautiful young Queen was soon suffocated.Straightforward, right? Except for where she gets to and how she returns to feed her baby and so on. But don't mind that for now. What's important is that I have a major scene to write that takes place in a bath-room. A royal bath-room. (Badstube, in the original German.)
Which looks like what? Where in the palace would it be? Steam bath or immersion? Water heated how? What's the floor made of? And so on.
Sure, I can go and look at Ingres, though his Turkish Bath is a bit more crowded than I think is plausible for the plot--in fact it's hard to make out the decor, so well-fleshed is the room. The Small Bather is likelier, if a more modest establishment.
I've been looking at a nice Victorian book advocating public bathhouses and laundry houses to improve hygiene in the cities. I've been looking at books of architecture. I was even courageous enough to google sauna and "bath house" and found a useful short history of the Finnish Sauna, with the following amusing notes:
He probably means the people in northern Germany, especially near the Baden area, who are rather loose with their morals. Among these people there are some who are so loose and degenerate in the hot baths that they even drink and sleep and allow themselves all kinds of evil and other foolishness in the baths. If such immodest creatures were found with their customs in Nordic bathing places, they would immediately be carried out and thrown into the deep winter snow drifts with the risk of being smothered. In the summer they would be thrown in ice cold water and left some time without food.
Which is interesting, but doesn't necessarily help me. So back to the bookstacks, where today I was lucky. First I found Die Bauernhausformen im Baltischen Raum (Farmhouses in the Baltic, roughly) with lovely drawings of rustic saunas and bath-rooms (Badestube, here) both set in the earth like a root-cellar and combined with a summer kitchen in one long building. There's the bath-house on Midame's farm, that Myl can remember wistfully, to establish the idea of steam baths.
Then a guidebook to The Royal Palace of Visegrad, with complete floorplans (as far as excavated at the date of publication) including the stove, the fuel storage, the water supply and drainage, the two rooms, one the sudatorium, the other not cleared but probably cool baths.
As a backup, I have Whitehall Palace, by Simon Thurley, an account of the excavations, including a sunken pool (Charles II did all right by himself) and a possible steam bath heated by a huge ceramic-tiled stove.
So now I can get it right. And I'm probably going to steal Visegrad for Alard's palace, because why not? It had great plumbing. And add some 1700s decor, to bring it up to date.
I'm ludicrously close to 75k, and still have about half the plot for the court section to go. Some ruthless cutting to come, clearly, but not until all the first draft is done. Then I'll put it away for a couple of weeks and draw maps and floorplans.
Tuesday, April 3, 2007
Writing-avoidance activities, series one: Worldbuilding
I am presently tempted to get out the coloured pencils and start drawing maps. So far I've kept rough track of the forest part of Willow Knot with a series of concentric circles that represent one-half day of walking, with the willow cottage at the centre. I fear that once I expand that 'map' to discover where the country borders are, I'll have to revise about half the directions I've been using. The road between the capital cities will almost certainly be reworked.
I've been putting it off, but the coloured pencils are calling me, especially as I get into the 3d section, Myl at court. I'll need some idea how the countries work, how close the cities are, means of travel, and so on.
Which means I need to make important decisions. So far I've thought of the story as set in the Grimm Brothers Maerchen Forest. Boreal forest, foot and horse travel, material culture at late 1700s level. Magic is real, sometimes, but it's the magic that most uneducated people believed in, so there's little adjustment to make. Other times magic is fraud, but frauds and tricksters show up in folktales often enough.
The real countries (France, Germany) may exist, but the action takes place in 'kingdoms' that are more like principalities or duchies, and may be revised into duchies etc. later. As long as I'm dealing with peasants and foresters, I can that vague. (There's a terrific scene in Witchfinder General where Marshall and the soldiers pursuing King Charles reach the coast and find an old man (mending nets?) who doesn't know the king has fled, doesn't know anything about kings or Protectors. Bare sandy beach, grass, and the wind blowing over their voices. It's as if they've reached the edge of the world.)
But once the story reaches the court, the situation has to be firmed up. I need names and maps. I can approach this a few different ways.
(Pause to strongly recommend Wrede on Worldbuilding)
I'll need a rough map of the forest and the marsh, showing the road, the robbers' den, the willow cottage and the edge of Midame's lands. I'll need a floor plan for the palace for the 3d part. I may need a layout of the capital city, but I'll probably steal that fairly directly from a city map of the appropriate time and appropriate landscape, if I can figure out those out.
Maybe I'll do that in the evenings, instead of reading FandomWank.
Another thought experiment: If your book were published, and acquired not only readers but fans, what sort of fanfiction can you imagine being written from it? How might you feel about characters being revised, and which characters or situations do you think might be more susceptible to revision?
The answer to yesterday's question is: Wait one or two days. If the swelling etc. just stops, it was the arthritis. My knee is almost normal today, which seems unlikely if it had really been injured.
Nice to have that figured out.
I've been putting it off, but the coloured pencils are calling me, especially as I get into the 3d section, Myl at court. I'll need some idea how the countries work, how close the cities are, means of travel, and so on.
Which means I need to make important decisions. So far I've thought of the story as set in the Grimm Brothers Maerchen Forest. Boreal forest, foot and horse travel, material culture at late 1700s level. Magic is real, sometimes, but it's the magic that most uneducated people believed in, so there's little adjustment to make. Other times magic is fraud, but frauds and tricksters show up in folktales often enough.
The real countries (France, Germany) may exist, but the action takes place in 'kingdoms' that are more like principalities or duchies, and may be revised into duchies etc. later. As long as I'm dealing with peasants and foresters, I can that vague. (There's a terrific scene in Witchfinder General where Marshall and the soldiers pursuing King Charles reach the coast and find an old man (mending nets?) who doesn't know the king has fled, doesn't know anything about kings or Protectors. Bare sandy beach, grass, and the wind blowing over their voices. It's as if they've reached the edge of the world.)
But once the story reaches the court, the situation has to be firmed up. I need names and maps. I can approach this a few different ways.
(Pause to strongly recommend Wrede on Worldbuilding)
- make up a fantasy world. I really don't want to do this. Really, really, really. I don't know enough about geology, geography, politics and logistics to even start. I suck at invention.
- alternate history. Take the map as it stood at the turn of the century, change the names of all the countries and fiddle the borders a bit. I think Guy Gavriel Kay approaches it that way.
- go the Ruritanian / Graustarkian route and just fiddle the borders to squish a few small countries in amongst the big ones, maybe in disputed territories like Alsace-Lorraine. Caroline Stevermer did that in College of Magics, I think. I don't count it as alternate history (though I suppose it is) because the trick predates the category.
I'll need a rough map of the forest and the marsh, showing the road, the robbers' den, the willow cottage and the edge of Midame's lands. I'll need a floor plan for the palace for the 3d part. I may need a layout of the capital city, but I'll probably steal that fairly directly from a city map of the appropriate time and appropriate landscape, if I can figure out those out.
Maybe I'll do that in the evenings, instead of reading FandomWank.
Another thought experiment: If your book were published, and acquired not only readers but fans, what sort of fanfiction can you imagine being written from it? How might you feel about characters being revised, and which characters or situations do you think might be more susceptible to revision?
The answer to yesterday's question is: Wait one or two days. If the swelling etc. just stops, it was the arthritis. My knee is almost normal today, which seems unlikely if it had really been injured.
Nice to have that figured out.
Friday, March 23, 2007
My eyes fail to glow eerily
The anti-malarial arthritis drug has this drawback. It can collect in the back of your eyes and make you partially blind. So I stopped in at the optometrist and asked about being checked over for a baseline reading of just how blind I currently am.
Oh, we can get you in now, if you want to wait twenty minutes.
I phoned in to work, and had a cup of tea. Twenty minutes later, my very strong blink reflex (my gag reflex is healthy too) was being tested and my pupils were distended enough for the admission of spelunkers. The conclusion was that the situation in the back of my eyes is stable (I don't extend this assurance to include my brain.)
I went in to work with the reassuring gaze of an opium addict, but fortunately I don't deal with the public. My dad, who was born in 1904, always said 'drug fiends' instead of 'junkies', and although in any other context he would have pronounced it 'feends', in that set phrase it was always 'fee-ends'.
No one at work noticed my fiendishness--one of my minor peeves in fiction is the assumption that people notice each other's eye-colour under circumstances that don't involve staring closely at someone's face. This is especially questionable when secondary characters are called on, usually under conditions of some stress, to notice that the hero or villain has changed his eye colour from mild grey to steely-grey or blue flame, or red flecks of rage are dancing in his eyes, or suchlike.
At home I got Chris to find his blacklight, and we shone it in my eyes, but alas, the effect of the drops had faded, and my eyes did not glow purple.
I endure disappointment. Still, I have a referral to a full opthamological exam, so I may have another chance. I could take the blacklight in to work, and plug it in at my desk.
Just finished reading Unexpected Magic, a collection of stories by Diana Wynne Jones. Mixed bag, as usual with shorts. The novella "Everard's Ride" was the most notable, a Ruritanian romance of sorts, set on the coast of England.
It started me wondering how much the Narnia books owe to the Ruritanian tradition, since they use the basic situation of characters from modern England stumbling into intrigue and plots in strange kingdoms where derring-do is still an option, people dress in romantic old-fashioned clothing, and everything is more highly coloured and vital somehow. Just add magic, some scriptural allegory, and go. I suppose someone has written a decent article on this. I should google and find out.
Trivia: the other name for Ruritanian romance is Graustarkian romance. The first has more recognition because The Prisoner of Zenda sold better than McCutcheon's books and had films made from it. The films are much lighter and more comic-opera-like than the book, by the way.
Suggestions for reliable low-cost web hosting are still being gratefully accepted, by the way. Not to, y'know, pester anyone.
Oh, we can get you in now, if you want to wait twenty minutes.
I phoned in to work, and had a cup of tea. Twenty minutes later, my very strong blink reflex (my gag reflex is healthy too) was being tested and my pupils were distended enough for the admission of spelunkers. The conclusion was that the situation in the back of my eyes is stable (I don't extend this assurance to include my brain.)
I went in to work with the reassuring gaze of an opium addict, but fortunately I don't deal with the public. My dad, who was born in 1904, always said 'drug fiends' instead of 'junkies', and although in any other context he would have pronounced it 'feends', in that set phrase it was always 'fee-ends'.
No one at work noticed my fiendishness--one of my minor peeves in fiction is the assumption that people notice each other's eye-colour under circumstances that don't involve staring closely at someone's face. This is especially questionable when secondary characters are called on, usually under conditions of some stress, to notice that the hero or villain has changed his eye colour from mild grey to steely-grey or blue flame, or red flecks of rage are dancing in his eyes, or suchlike.
At home I got Chris to find his blacklight, and we shone it in my eyes, but alas, the effect of the drops had faded, and my eyes did not glow purple.
I endure disappointment. Still, I have a referral to a full opthamological exam, so I may have another chance. I could take the blacklight in to work, and plug it in at my desk.
Just finished reading Unexpected Magic, a collection of stories by Diana Wynne Jones. Mixed bag, as usual with shorts. The novella "Everard's Ride" was the most notable, a Ruritanian romance of sorts, set on the coast of England.
It started me wondering how much the Narnia books owe to the Ruritanian tradition, since they use the basic situation of characters from modern England stumbling into intrigue and plots in strange kingdoms where derring-do is still an option, people dress in romantic old-fashioned clothing, and everything is more highly coloured and vital somehow. Just add magic, some scriptural allegory, and go. I suppose someone has written a decent article on this. I should google and find out.
Trivia: the other name for Ruritanian romance is Graustarkian romance. The first has more recognition because The Prisoner of Zenda sold better than McCutcheon's books and had films made from it. The films are much lighter and more comic-opera-like than the book, by the way.
Suggestions for reliable low-cost web hosting are still being gratefully accepted, by the way. Not to, y'know, pester anyone.
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