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I slept and dreamed that life was joy,
I awoke and saw that life was duty,
I acted, and behold duty was joy.
– Rabindranath Tagore

Having finished the work in progress, I’ve moved on to the next project: which means I’ve opened a book about a third done that I started a while back. While I am largely pleased with a lot of what I found beneath the dust: solid plot, good scene breaks, nice levels of action – something critical was missing. My last project had a really strong main character, a real scene stealer. One of the important things for me in the new book is to push myself, try to write a new character (and not just keep recycling a single personality type). While working on this, at making the new guy distinct from the old one, edits and critiques of the last book are coming in. Together, this makes writing more work than pleasure. It’s work I want to be doing, but expressing it raised a conversation with a friend about writing for the joy of it and writing towards trying to publish while another friend was struggling with being blocked too busy with her daily life to find the time to work on her book.

By nature, writing novels is a weird exercise. You work alone, maybe talking through ideas or discussing elements of the book, but ultimately, you do it by yourself. You steal time away from friends and family, forgoing television or the gym to find the time to put hand to keyboard. Then you start to share it with others, getting input, and learning that you completely fouled something up in the first act. Critical feedback too early in the game can crush your motivation, so you ignore it until you’re ready. Then you rewrite, edit, rewrite, for what feels like forever. When you’re finished, no matter how hard you worked, there’s no guarantee of success. So how do you keep going?

Write the book you believe in, the story you want to tell. This way, when the rejections come, and they may be little or they may be huge, you can keep going. It takes a little delusion to believe in your writing, but not too much. Over-confidence can blind you to self-improvement. I think one of the hardest things about writing a book is learning that you may never sell it. You might never make it big enough to see one of your books on the rack at your local bookstore. Each rejection can dissuade you, get you down. You’ve got to push past this, improving and striving while you sift through the feedback to learn what’s useful. This is where writing for the fun of it comes in. Take pleasure in the craft, in the work. Don’t give up, and keep getting better. It’s toil. It’s hard. And it has to be worth it even if you never publish. Write because you love to.

We all have multiple selves, the version we think we show the world, the version we actually show the world, our inner self who our outer self never quite resembles, and countless others.

One intriguing way of handling character is the secret identity. You can’t wear a mask too long without it becoming part of you. Superheroes come immediately to mind, and we’ll probably forever ask if Superman is Clark Kent or if Clark Kent is Superman? Which is his authentic self, or are they both true versions of a single man?

Princess Katya Nar Umbriel has a few secrets. One is that each member of her family houses a bit of Fiend inside them. But Katya also has a secret job. As the second child she leads an order dedicated to containing threats to the throne. Guarding her loved ones forces her to play the rake, seducing courtiers who want only the favors Katya’s position can win them. In the middle of her toughest investigation yet, hunting highly-placed conspirators, she’s tired of the string of meaningless bed-mates. When she meets Starbride, a foreign scholar with no interest in court affairs, Katya finds someone she hopes she can be herself with.

Starbride hasn’t come to court seeking a spouse, regardless of her mother’s hopes for her. Despite being encumbered with a wardrobe that evokes more than a few comparisons to pastries, she’s come to study law, and wants nothing more than to while her time in the library. A brief encounter with Katya, the princess who loves and hates hunting, can’t help but intrigue Starbride, especially when Katya conceals her identity long enough to show Starbride a bit of her true self.

Barbara Ann Wright’s the Pyramid Waltz, is at its heart a love story, but there’s a juicy game of who’s who built into the plot. Katya has a lot of selves, a lot of layers, and their revelation makes for an enticing read.

Autumn is coming. Yesterday, I pulled some onions from the garden, felt the first cut of cold in the air, and watched some leaves fall. I took a walk with a friend through the neighborhood last night, admiring the odd mix of little ranches built in the 50s and the McMansions sprouting up where houses like mine have been scraped away. We passed a lot where the hot water tank, the air conditioner, and other metal objects lay in a twisted heap. We spared a moment, trying to identify the remains of whatever appliances had died there. I mused that there will probably come a time when the rental houses around me sell and get replaced, leaving my green little house to cringe in the shadow of the great boxes looming around it.

The walk got me thinking about setting, how important it is, and where I can strengthen it in my current work in progress. A great setting can be an amazing character in of itself, vibrant or treacherous. And of course setting can be overdone, loom so large it overshadows the characters, plot, and story. In fantasy, whether urban or epic, setting plays a crucial role, though I suspect urban often has a lot more fun with it.

Most urban fantasy works with transitions from the mortal or daylight world to another, more mysterious realm. The Never Never in Jim Butcher’s the Dresden Files, the Nightside in Simon Green’s Nightside books, or the Summer Lands in Seanan McGuire’s October Daye series are all excellent examples of worlds living just beneath our own. This approach gives the authors the ability to move from the mundane to the magic without warning. It also grants the chance to dial it back when needed, thus avoiding the problem of scenery overwhelming story. In all three examples I listed above, scenery is nearly a character. It lurks, entraps, and awaits the unprepared. Only the Nightside is the magical setting you might want to live in, and even there, the unwary don’t fare very well.

The danger, as always, is to overdo it, provide too much detail and choke off the reader’s imagination. Once you bleed the life out of the scenery it grows tattered and tired, and I suspect this is partly why epic fantasy, based on the medieval European society, gets wearisome sometimes. Epic fantasy has reached the point where castles, knights, and swords are all nearly as mundane to us as cars and concrete. Like anything else in literature, the trick is to give them a new spin or angle. Opening a door to a world of the imagination, like Faerie, brings endless potential. Never is an alternate world just one thing, one place or flavor. This doesn’t mean that non fantasy writers can’t leverage setting to great effect. I read Pat Conroy’s the Prince of Tides twenty years ago, and I still remember his descriptions of the protagonist’s home town. Its denizens and downfall still come to mind.

Regardless of genre, a writer can twist scenery to their advantage. It can symbolize and express where the characters cannot. It’s one more important tool in our kit, one more to master, and learn to use just right.

Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, and Buck Rogers – I came of age in a time of great space opera and science fiction. They drew me in, excited my mind, and though the physics were sometimes less than accurate (sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum), the space battles awed me. The more ships and fighters zipping racing across a star field, the more enthralled I became. I love the humanism at the heart of classic Star Trek, the mythic journey of Star Wars, and the religious echoes in Galactica; but a busy space battle, with broadsides and collisions, never fails me. This same spirit, of massive fleets racing towards each other, guides Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series.

Campbell starts on a good premise: the Alliance fleet has been trapped far behind enemy lines. The death of their leadership forces the fleet to turn to John “Black Jack” Geary, a war hero revived after a century of survival sleep. Finding himself retroactively promoted and the object of hero worship by a fleet whose military protocols he barely recognizes, Geary is given the seemingly impossible task of getting the fleet safely back to Alliance space.

What follows is a long trek from system to system. The fleet is battered, under-supplied, and utterly cut off from friendly support. Internal tensions flare, threatening Geary’s leadership as he attempts to restore order to the fleet’s command structure. As I read through, I find myself looking forward to the next battle, where Geary’s mastery of tactics often snatches victory from defeat; but Campbell uses the time between battles well. Sabotage adds to the tension as Geary struggles to realign the fleet’s priorities.

I’ll admit that I found the first book, Dauntless, a little thin on the characterization. Geary’s setbacks didn’t seem to hit him hard enough, but as the series advances, Campbell does a remarkable job of spinning several plates at once. The characters become more realized, and Campbell even manages to make me laugh out loud from time to time. I’m nearly to Victorious, the final book in the original series, when we’ll learn if the fleet makes it home or not. I have to say that I’ve really enjoyed the trip.

This isn’t really a blog post. It’s more a love note to a band and an expression of gratitude to the universe.

No music has ever influenced my spiritual or creative self more than Dead Can Dance. Whether it’s their original albums or Lisa Gerrard’s solo work, I return to them year after year. They’ve been a huge part of my life since I thought I was going to be a painter, when I was a poet, and now that I see myself as a novelist. A crush gave me their Passage in Time collected hits album, and while he’s long gone from my life, Dead Can Dance has forever lingered. When my grandmother, the closest family I’ve had, died, I listened to Lisa Gerrard’s Mirror Pool album until I could contain my grief and board the plane. When I drove to Delphi to see the ruins of the oracle, I listened to a mix of their most ethereal songs.

I never thought I’d see them live. They ended their collaboration not too long after I discovered them. If you asked me to name one group I’d pay nearly any amount to see live, Dead Can Dance would be my instant answer. But a reunion tour has come together, their second that I know of (I simply couldn’t manage the first as they didn’t come anywhere near Denver).

So I’m going to Dead Can Dance tonight, in the city I’ve made my home, on my birthday, and I couldn’t ask for a better gift.

You can’t learn to write in a vacuum. Feedback, and learning to take it, are both essential to your growth as a writer. Like editing, feedback sharpens your awareness of what you need to work on. But too much of anything, including feedback, can introduce fresh problems.

In the case of feedback, too much can put you into an endless editing cycle. You finish a draft, you solicit feedback, you edit again. Wash, rinse, repeat – then it’s been years and you’re still trying to finish that novel. When the feedback loop is out of control you have to stop, find your own editorial voice, and re-center your work. Asking yourself some questions can help:

1. Is my book ready for feedback? Putting your work out there is a lot like sending your child off to her first day of school. She’s unlearned, untested, but she should be dressed and armed with glue, crayons, and a straw for firing spitballs. Similarly, your writing should be ready for people to see it. It doesn’t need to be perfect, that’s the whole point of soliciting feedback, but it should be complete. You should know what your writing is about, where it’s going, and who it’s intended for. Imagine you’re going to be interviewed about it. When your book is published, who’s going to want to buy it? Can you sum up the plot in a few sentences? If asked, can you explain your vision for the novel? If you can’t answer these questions, you’re probably not ready for feedback.

2. Who’s your audience? Every book has an audience. It may be as small as your own family or as large as a dedicated fan base. Even if you’re writing towards commercial success, you still have an audience. Stephen King, in On Writing, suggests identifying an ideal reader, a single person you’re writing to. This gives you an excellent way of narrowing your audience to a specific person. But however you do it, identify the person or people you’re writing to. Your work should be targeting them. They should enjoy what you’re creating. Imagine their response to your work. Play with them. Entertain them. But don’t never them. Even when you’re deep in the zone, crafting a fantastic bit of dialogue, some tiny part of you should be wondering if the audience will care.

3. Are you trying to please everyone? The other side of the audience coin is the scope of the feedback. In a critique group or workshop, you’re going to get, and give, a lot of feedback. Much of it is going to come from other writers, all of whom have their own vision for their writing, and much of it isn’t going to apply. This is where developing a clear relationship with your internal editor is crucial. You have to balance what the critique says against your work. Some of the feedback will resonate, indicate an area where you need to improve. Some of it won’t pertain to what you’re trying to do. Take all the feedback as it’s given, and say thank you. Someone took the time to read your work and give you input on it. They’ve done you a kind favor. Then sift through their notes and see what truly applies and what doesn’t. You can’t please anyone, and you shouldn’t try, especially if the feedback would change what your book is trying to do.

4. Are you listening to the feedback you’re getting? It’s very easy to put your writing on an artistic pedestal, consider it above feedback, and ignore whatever comes at you. This is a terrible way to behave in a workshop, and arrogance is generally a sign of some deep insecurity about your work. But it’s also easy to self-deprecate, be insecure, and let all the feedback you get guide your writing, thereby creating the endless feedback loop. The first situation is easy to fix: open your mind. If you can’t, don’t sign up for workshops. Please. The rest of us will thank you. The second situation has a more elegant solution. Develop your inner editor. If you don’t have one, create one. I imagine mine as J. Jonah Jameson from Spider-Man. All the feedback goes to him first. Waving his noxious cigar, he decides which feedback resonates, matters, and gets passed on to the more sensitive writer part of myself. The rest he still reads, scanning carefully for ways to improve my writing, but he still sets it aside. He doesn’t order a full rewrite of the book because one person didn’t like the love interest.

Ghosts in the machine who believe they’re alive, ten thousand space stations, each with its own government or political system, a woman whose only hope for survival is an instant decapitation: these are just a few of the big ideas floating around in Alastair Reynolds’ the Prefect.

My tour of Science Fiction brought me to the Prefect on a whim, and what a read it was. Though Reynolds constructs a complex universe, he doesn’t let the diverse concepts eclipse the central plot.

A dangerous conspiracy with vast tendrils threatens the Glitter Band, the democratic confederacy of ten thousand unique habitats. Despite the scope of the danger, murder is murder, and that’s where Prefects come in. Prefects protect the Glitter Band from crime, corruption, and other threats. Reynolds uses three points of view, the primary being that of Tom Dreyfus, a field Prefect who occasionally borders on the cliché. Thankfully, Reynolds doesn’t stress the noir theme too heavily.

The plot rocks along until nearly every thread is tied off. The most seemingly disparate elements get woven together. Reynolds injects enough action, including the ballsiest escape sequence I’ve ever read. I was pleased to learn that the Prefect is one in a much larger series, one I’m looking forward to exploring.