Ch	Title	Words	Pages	From	To
1	The Tengrem	10,547	33	1	33
2	The Truth	14,584	46	34	79
3	Appearances	15,256	50	80	129
4	Prophecies and Revelations	12,481	43	130	172
5	Mages and Messages	13,011	44	173	216
6	Two Princesses	11,468	39	217	255
7	The Road and the City	10,800	37	256	292
8	Transformations	10,376	35	293	327
9	Family	10,147	34	328	361
10	Magic	8,907	30	362	391
11	Mind and Matter	12,526	42	392	433
12	Rescuers	13,543	46	434	479
13	War and Peace	12,959	45	480	524
	totals	156,605	524
	averages	12,046.5	40.31

Now to sell the dang thing!

NOW, when it's too late, I read the submission guidelines by the person who will actually see my manuscript in the slush pile. I followed the posted ones - really, I did! - but argh! It's not in Courier New, and the synopsis isn't double-spaced, and I didn't use a rubber band, and my three chapters are twice as long as the 60 page maximum she wants to see.

And I've got the stress test in the morning. It's safe to say I've got the stress part working already.

Karen

John Scalzi has found another link to another  web widget, this one a Science Fiction Plot Generator.   I can't say I'm impressed.  It's basically a Madlib, with lists of words plugged into the following framework:

A (adjective) (kind of person) is (gerund) (situation) in a (adjective) (place).  His/her (home locale) is destroyed by a (adjective) (villian or disaster).  With the help of a (adjective) (type of person), he/she must first (cliche action) in order to avert disaster and save (social unit).

The results are more disjointed than amusing, I'm afraid.  So I wrote one of my own instead:

A resourceful data-blogger is synthesizing endo-knowledge in the Martian Googleplex.  His doctoral thesis is destroyed by a sentient virus.  With the help of mutant dog, he must first negotiate a treaty with the virus colony in order to avert disaster and save his swim team.
 
Eh.  It's still not very interesting.

So where's the fantasy plot generator?  Well, let's see if I can Google one up.  Well, okay, this one's kind of neat:

Serendipity: http://nine.frenchboys.net/

This person has generators for people names, place names, character descriptions, treasures, and lots of other stuff., including a

Fantasy Plotter

Now we're talkin'. 

A charming prince befriends a beautiful unicorn, and pandemonium ensues.
A beautiful demigoddess and a orphan seek a legendary sword in this tale of a heroic quest.
A brash elf and a mermaid seek a legendary god in this tale of adventure.
A mad farmer and a witch seek a legendary grail in this tale of silliness.
A mysterious pixie and a prince seek a legendary grail in this tale of danger.
In this story, dwarves and peasants clash with a heroic dwarf stuck in the middle.

And you can even flesh it out with a

Plot Twist Generator

What you need now is an interdimensional portal.

Oh, ouch.  There's the second two-thirds of Mages of Mâvarin, reduced to nine words, six of which don't count.  If it comes up with something about a magic coin or amnesia next, I will be most put out:

At this juncture a perky librarian arrives and calls the FBI.
Suddenly a ghost grabs your protagonist by the shirtfront.
The scene changes, and a street vendor arrives and starts to gossip.
What you need now is the Loch Ness Monster.
Without warning a macho cashier arrives and ransacks the building.

Oh, well, that's all right then.

And of course there's a title generator.  Sara came up with a goodie:

Autumn, King, and God

Can you imagine introducing this trio around?  "Um, this is the incarnation of the season Autumn, here on the left, and the guy in the middle is named King, and he also is a king, and the guy on the right is, well, God."

I found some other stuff, but that will do it for now. I want to get in this Rani site, probably spider-generated, unfortunately deleted before I got there.  It had the intriguing title "Rani ran deep."  Some highlights from Google's cached page are as follows:

Deep demersal fish assemblage structure in the Porcupine seabight

Dress. by Maha Laxmi. (Part-I) "Mummy, I need a new uniform," said Rani, inspecting herself in the mirror. ... "Mummy!" Rani ran up to her mother on Saturday morning ... She closed her eyes and, taking a deep breath, mustered all the courage she could, hating each passing second ...

Outpost 10F - Writers Guild
Tore Leifson is coming to attack us" Rani, the trell said, taking deep breaths. "It is all right, send the messenger inside Rani" Tora said...

rani-, ran- (Latin: frog). ...

Del Merden / Carli Selevar
... 16-year-old Del Merden is Rani Fost’s best friend. Del has a bad ... and the Tengrem Del turned and ran, his soft-booted feet pounding ... The tengrem took several slow, deep breaths. It seemed to calm ...

and of course
Look for rani ran deep
Find rani ran deep at one of the best sites the Internet has to offer!

I gather that Rani is a fairly common female name in India, and more specificaly the name of a beloved Ballywood actrress.  I can't help that, any more than I can keep Disney from giving Tinker Bell a pixie friend named Rani.  My Rani is going to stay Rani regardless - well, unless an editor insists otherwise as a condition of publication.  Then I'll consider making a change.  Maybe.

Karen

Thanks, John Scalzi, for the link to the Albert Einstein interactive chalkboard.  I'm no expert on relativity - never even took physics in school, unfortunately.  But the subject always reminds me of theories about the existence of multiple universes.  If there are multiple universes, I'm pretty sure that Rani and Cathma and the rest exist in at least one of them.

Turns out that the great man agrees with me:



I sorta kinda believe in this, although I honestly don't like the nihilistic conclusion if every possibility is inevitably played out somewhere.  See, if every time you did something nice, some other you somewhere was inevitably doing something mean, free will would be a sham, and it would not be possible to do any good at all at the multiverse level.  Yuck.  No.  If there's any justice in the multiverse, the number of possibilities cannot truly be infinite.

Of course, I can't prove any of this.  Then again, I'm not a world-renowned dead genius physicist.

The only knotty problem for old Albert here, aside from the question of how exactly to jump timelines. is whether every "possibility" includes universes where the laws of physics are very different, leading to the existence of magic-based ones.  I sure hope so!

I've got another Einsteinian message posted to Outpost.  Check it out.

My plans for the weekend are to do some reading, including the extras in the 30th Anniversary edition of The Princess Bride by William Goldman, and to get some work done at the office to make up for Wednesday (and to get caught up).  Next week, I hope to get started on a major rewrite and edit of Mages.

Karen

I've been meaning to write something over here for two weeks now. There are Weekly Writer's Questions over on CIW: The Other Invisible, and I've got three of them saved up to answer here. Only I don't have time to write the answers!

The priority, of course, is Heirs, and I'm finally making real progress. I did move that one scene (thanks, Sara and Sarah!) I'm up to Chapter Six now, page 229 in the Word documents.

One problem I'm having, and it's a minor one, is that I get caught up in going through the Word version, and forget to turn pages on the printout. I've had to double back a number of times, - and yes,I do find things in the printout that I missed in the document.

The other problem is keeping track of the dates. I'm still not 100% sure I should submit these with the date headers, but I just added in some missing ones. Even if I take them out later, it's good to pay attention to where I am in terms of dates, so that one storyline doesn't get ahead of another. Unfortunately, the outline in which I worked out the dates of all the scenes is, well, out of date! The chapter breaks have moved since then, and scenes have been moved around. I'm not sure whether it's worth spending an evening synchronizing it to the current version.

Dang, it's late. Good night!

Karen

I won a major award (sort of), and it wasn't a leg lamp!

I tied with Vince in the VIVI Awards, in the category Best Poetry / Fiction Journal. I tried very hard not to count on winning, but I'm very relieved anyway.

VIVI Winners list

In other news, it's time for my Saturday night fiction entry, and I've had a little trouble deciding what to do, now that Mall of Mâvarin is finally over. I emailed John Scalzi today asking whether he thinks posting two chapters of Heirs would be problematic. Honestly, I don't expect him to answer, but I'll give him a week to do so.

That means I need something else for tonight. The Kate Chronicles don't count, because of the "this is really happening" device I've been using with those entries. And I really want something that people who look for the first time will be able to follow. So I think I'll do a one-off Mâvarin first-person entry, a prequel one. I hope it's accessible to newbies!

Karen

Not the best quiz ever, but the result is fairly apt.


Yearning for the great story.
You want knights on white horses slaying dragons,
or simply people doing great things. You want
to know what it's all about.


What do you yearn for?
brought to you by Quizilla

AND, from another quiz:

You are a nerd, which isn't REALLY a geek. Sorry.
But hey- you ARE smart, and you probably ARE
picked on. And since I love you, too, we'll let
you share some of the geek-glory, for now. And
while we're at it... wanna do my homework, too?
Your science project was very likely a
hovercraft, and I wouldn't be surprised if you
were internationally trying to rewrite the
basic programming of the Internet- just
remember, timing can be a problem. I would be
honored if you were to contact me, via email-
frodolives17@sbcglobal.net- or via instant
message, NASAgeek19.


The Geek Shall Inherit the Earth: What Geek Stereotype Are You?
brought to you by Quizilla

As recounted at length in Musings, I found a bunch of very early Mâvarin notes tonight in a box I'd assumed to be all recent stuff. I also found notes and letters and handwritten drafts from 1989, when I finally completed the novel's first full draft. Cool!

My main interest at the moment is the early work, the handwritten pages from high school, including the following map:



If the map's compass points seem bizarre and wonky, that's only because they are. I have no idea why I did that, but the ocean should definitely be east of Mâvarin.

Also in the folder of notes and fragments from 1974-1977 was the first and only work I ever submitted to F&SF, a 1975(?) poem called the Ballad of Epli and Amtula [originally Amptûla].  I'd been looking for this for a very long time, hoping I could revise it enough to use it in the books, which already refer to the song's existence. 

It's terrible!  Judge for yourself.  Even with corrected punctuation, it's quite hopeless:

From Mâton in the western sea
Came Epli in the long ago,
Under sail of burning tree,
With burning arrows, golden bow.

His hair burned like the mountain bright
That shaped his distant golden land;
His eyes burned with a golden light;
A golden arm, a golden hand

Would conquer all it sought to do,
With flashing sword in golden hilt,
Or burning arrows, golden hued,
His reputation quickly built.

And soon the crowds acclaimed him King,
Built golden hall for golden man,
That later peoples still might sing
Of golden time in golden land.

The seaport town of Fârna Lûn
Grew with trade from cities far,
That golden city, renamed soon
The golden land of Eplimar.

A wife he took, a brown haired lass
With deep brown eyes.  Her will was strong;
A Princess of the Northern Pass,
Fair Amptûla he courted long.

"Come South with me, my love," said he;
"I long to take a brown-haired bride."
"Then wed a bearded dwarf," said she,
"If love does not win over pride."

"But I have conquered man and beast,
And I can conquer woman, too.
You were at the golden feast;
You saw the things that I can do."

"The human heart," the wise girl said,
"Cannot by conquered by the sword,
But should by gentle word be led.
Your golden exploits leave me bored."

The golden sovereign scratched his head.
His tactics he would have to change
If he a golden bridal bed
With Amptûla would soon arrange.

He brought her gifts - a dragon's head,
A hoarded grail made all of gold -
"Cease!" the brown-haired maiden said.
"These aren't the things I wish to hold."

He took her then into his arms.
"Brave deeds are all I know to do.
But 'Las! Now having seen your charms,
I'd give up even these for you."

"At last!" said she.  "Now that will do."
And they were wed that very day.
Now home he stayed, quite happ'ly, too--
Come, let us hear some other lay.

Now, I have to admit that there are a few things I like about the darn thing, principly the sense of humor, the undercutting of his heroics by her scornful replies, and the balladeer's disapproval of the resolution.  I like the sounds of the words, and the hoary but serviceable meter and rhyme.  But oh, what a mess it is otherwise!  The language is stilted, the ending is telegraphed halfway through, and the grammar has problems. The sociology of it is dated at best, and Amptûla's demand is both unreasonable and unbelievable.  Oh, and every detail about Mâvarin is wrong, from geography to politics to anthropology.  Yuck.  This is every bit as painful as the inept or deliberately bad writing I've mentioned in past entries, the PublishAmerica monstrosities and so on.  I'm so proud--not.

I post it here, though, to make what I think is a very important point.  Writers all have to start somewhere. Chances are excellent that their early attempts will be well below professional standards.  But here's the good news: it gets better.  You have to keep writing, page after page, probably manuscript after manuscript.  You have to look for ways to make it better, and recognize both the flaws and the things worth keeping.  For me, the improvement came after many years of writing non-fiction instead, followed by handwriting in restaurants and typing it up at night, reworking and revising, moving and replacing whole blocks of text, lather, rinse, repeat.  Even when I thought the book was done, I was wrong.  Two years of steady work on the sequel caused me to completely rework tengrem behavior and psychology, leading to a much more interesting story.  I'm sure others things improved at the same time, but that's the main thing I noticed.

And now I look back on this terrible early stuff, the work of a beginning writer still too enamored of Tolkien; and I see how far I've come since then.  That's why I'm not ashamed to post my silly poem for you to laugh at.  The fact that I now know it's bad, and why and how, and the fact that my work is so much better now, thirty long years later, show me I have something to be proud of after all.  I started from Epli and Amptûla, and made my way through decades of drafts and boxes of paper, to end up with a novel that should be publishable right now, and a very long sequel that can be made publishable if I do the work.  It's been a very long journey, but a good one.

With that in mind, I have advice for a certain person who has been wondering whether characters and concepts she devised in adolescence can ever be turned into a story good enough for people to buy at Barnes & Noble.  Compare the oldest stuff you have with what you wrote last night.  Consider how much better it will be the next time through.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

You'll get there.

Karen

Cross-posted from Musings:

Reminder for sf / fantasy fans:

The Clarion Midnight Auction has started. Bids will be accepted until 11:59 pm EST on Saturday, January 29, 2005.

Click on a name below to jump directly to your favorite author/editor/artist.

Steve Berman   Michael Bishop   Bruce Boston   David Brin   Tobias Buckell

Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren   Ellen Datlow   Cory Doctorow   Harlan Ellison

Neil Gaiman   William Gibson   Nicola Griffith and Stephen Pagel   Joe Haldeman

The Brothers Hildebrandt   Michael Jasper   Leonard Kirk   Ellen Kushner

Geoffrey A. Landis   Philip Lawson   Bruce McAllister   Judith Merril

Dan Mishkin   Gary Myers   Al Sarrantonio   William Browning Spencer 

Jeff VanderMeer    Howard Waldrop   Martha Wells   Kate Wilhelm   Connie Willis

Note to Shelly and other NASA/Mars fans: one of the items is MARS EXPLORATION ROVER OFFICIAL PROJECT MEMORABILIA**

This benefits the Clarion Writer's Workshop at Michigan State University. Don't anybody bid on theHarlan Ellison book, okay?

Stop back later tonight on Musings. I'll update this posting with at least the beginning of my Clarion story. Teaser: when I saw the little clipping on the office door of the English prof who was never there, I had no idea it was the first step toward finding my husband, the love of my life.

Karen

6 days to the end of my undergraduate classes!

Tomorrow is the day the World Fantasy Convention starts in the Phoenix area. If John hadn't been fired, and if Dave at work hadn't unexpectedly taken vacation time this week to visit his girlfriend in Medford, I'd have gone to at least part of it.

Years ago, I was told that the World Fantasy Con is much more of a writers' industry confab than a fan gathering. I had hoped to meet agents and editors this weekend, and to get the Mâvarin manuscripts past the first readers, into the hands of people with the power to say yes. But the three volumes of Mages of Mâvarin aren't ready, the money's not available, and my time is as scarce as the money. Plus there's Halloween to deal with. Ah, well.

I've got one more Critical Thinking class, and then Economics and then the capstone course, which is about ethics. Because of holiday scheduling, I have no classes for most of December. Maybe I can use that time to get Mages under control, but I honestly doubt it. By then, we'll probably be gearing up for selling the house next year and moving elsewhere.

At some point, I'm also going to have to talk to Mal at work about my leaving, so that he has time to hire someone else and I have time to train that person. But not yet. He has to know it's coming, but I don't want to put a strain on our working relationship too early in the process. Besides, I want to be all caught up with my work before I say something, so it doesn't seem that I'm leaving him in the lurch, with a mess to be cleaned up after I leave.

Karen

Upon discovering that I left my critical thinking chapters home this morning, I went to lunch today with a piece of scrap paper instead. Half an hour later, I'd solved a major chronology glitch in those chapters of Return to Mâvarin that I was reading all night Saturday.

The problem was that while Temet was having three days' worth of adventures, Fayubi, Cathma, Crel and Prince Talber were having only two. The non-Temet storylines were tightly interwoven, in a cascade of parallel and interdependent events. The only way to stretch it out over three days would be for people in two worlds to prick their fingers on the needles of spinning wheels (or eat poisoned apples, I suppose), causing a convenient 24-hour coma. Needless to say, I didn't explore that option. But it made sense for Temet to be in the dead village for two nights, and on to the spirit attack on the third day. Attempts to synchronize Temet's scenes to Fayubi's trauma only resulted in major inconsistencies in Temet's scenes.

The solution is to tighten up Temet's scenes, so he's only in that village for one night. It will take some combining and reworking, but the result should be more a concise and intense turning point in the character's life. This can only be a good thing.

Karen

Apropos of the manuscript on eBay, Circle's, Night Travels of the Elven Vampire, some of the people on my UoP learning teams, and my husband's boss (I want to throw in Republicans, too, but I won't), here's an explanation:

Unskilled and Unaware of It

I heard about this a year or two ago on NPR or CNN, but came across the actual link just today.

Oh, and here's another fun, unrelated link:

Klingons for Kerry

Karen