This LJ has been lying fallow for many months. I don't care all that much, but I think it's time to revive it. I suspect there's a compartment of my brain with which to connect it.

Earlier today I doubled back and edited the last few pages of Heirs again, having gone through those same pages in a rush the night before while tired. It was worth it. Paragraphs were reworked; sentences were cut; words were changed; and the last page of the chapter no longer was. When I opened ch13, the last chapter of the book, I got to renumber the first page back 13 pages from the last time I updated its numbering. That's pretty good - although I suspect not all the word and page count numbers were from the edit immediately prior to this one.

Chapter 13 ho!

Meanwhile...nah, I'll save that for the main blog.

Karen

Today was the one year anniversary of my three chapters, synopsis and cover letter for Heirs of Mâvarin arriving on the slush pile at Tor Books in New York. I was reminded of this fact in a dream this morning, in which Patrick Nielsen Hayden got annoyed with me for temporarily storing ham and cheese in a Tor mailbox, and announced he would have nothing more to do with me. I don't have the nerve to do it, but for months I've been fantasizing that I could mark this occasion with an anniversary card, something like this:

The reason I wouldn't send it is not that I think Patrick and Teresa wouldn't enjoy the joke. They might indeed find it funny, which is why I have no fear about posting it where they may possibly find out about it and take a peek. But actually sending such a thing, as a physical card or in an email, strikes me as the kind of unprofessional attention-grabbing stunts that Carol Pinchefsky writes about in her posting "It Came from the Slush Pile." Unfavorable attention on me instead of favorable attention toward the three chapters and synopsis is the last thing I want right now.  Yes, I do wish PNH would decide, and soon, to ask for the rest of the manuscript.  But if a little nudge from John Scalzi and a polite follow-up letter from me haven't hurried things along, a joke card certainly won't do so, except possibly to encourage the issuance of a rejection letter. 

In a way it's fitting that I be made to wait for this all-important reply. There's a reason why the Beatles' lyric, "It took me years to write, will you take a look?" resonates so strongly for me.  Heirs of Mâvarin did take me years to write.  Too many years, really, but that's what happens when a book slowly teaches you how to write it over the course of a few decades. Unless the bottom suddenly falls out of the fantasy fiction market, I don't really mind waiting a few more years for a publisher to buy, print and distribute my beloved first novel. Heck, it gives me more time to work on the sequels!

On the other hand, if this long wait for a response ends in a printed form rejection, I fully expect to cry for a week before sending it out again.

Karen

It's time to resurrect my poor, neglected LJ with the Writer's Weekly Question:

Writer's Weekly Question #14

How much do you borrow from your favorite writers, and how much is actually your very own ideas? At what point does "borrowing" become "plagiarism?"

Okay, I am NOT amused.  I just wrote practically a disseration on this subject.  What did LJ save?  Nothing after the question itself!

I'll try again. 

It's often said that there are only seven plots.  The actual list varies, and some writers have managed to reduce it to just two or three items, but the basic concept holds true.  If you define it all broadly enough, all fiction can be lumped into just a few categories, covering types of conflict as well as such themes as transformation, sacrifice, the journey and so on.  At this level of abstraction, everyone is traveling a well-worn road.  Plagiarism is not even an issue.  The use of archetypal themes is generally thought to be a good thing, because it tickles the mind in a certain way, tapping into things that have interested human beings for millenia.  In Heirs of Mâvarin alone, I can find transformation, the quest, coming of age, man vs. man, the "brave little tailor" and so on.  I didn't put most of those things there on purpose, but that's the beauty of archetypes and myth in fiction.  They tend to crop up unbidden, enriching the story.

If you're writing in a particular genre, the territory inevitably becomes even more familiar.  A fantasy novel will involve magic, science fiction will have extrapolated science or technology, and a bildungroman will have a person moving into adulthood.  Here's where things can start to seem a little derivative, but ultimately it's considered okay to a few stock elements, as long as they're presented in an original way.

As we move from the general to the specific, things become increasingly problematic.  It's okay to have a mysterious stranger help your everyman hero.  But if that stranger is hidden royalty, and worse yet a Ranger, you're moving beyond archetype into imitation of a specific work.  You can write about a high school student who finds out that she's really a princess, but if she starts keeping a diary and taking princess lessons from her grandmother, Meg Cabot will have every right to get cranky.   (Paul Park's princess, shown at right, owes nothing to Cabot's Princess Mia.)

The particular case that's in the news goes way beyond this.  Plagiarism consists of the work's actual presentation being similar or identical to the work being copied.  Writing about wookies and light sabres without permission from Lucusfilm falls under this heading, but generally it comes down to the unattributed use of another writer's words.  The college student whose book was just pulled by her publisher used slightly-reworded passages from at least three books by at least two other authors.  That is unquestionably plagiarism.  The only major defense is "unintentional plagiarism," which is what George Harrison claimed when it was pointed out that My Sweet Lord was extremely similar in melody to He's So Fine by the Chiffons.   There are legitimately times when we're not sure whether a particular turn of phrase is ours alone, or half-remembered from something we read or heard.  But when it happens over and over, in reasonably large blocks of text, it's unlikely to be accidental.

I should also distinguish between informal nonfiction, formal essays and fiction in this regard.  In my blogging I often use brief quotations of familiar phrases without attribution, such as "amazingly amazing" (a Hitchhiker's Guide reference) or "D'oh!" (a reference to Homer Simpson's "annoyed grunt"). I expect most of my readers to recognize such references without my pedantically calling attention to them.  The web is full of geeky references to Douglas Adams, The Simpsons and other bits of popular culture.  But in a formal or scholarly work, such a reference needs a citation, if it's used at all.  Similarly, a fictional character may reasonably make a brief reference to popular culture, as a way of showing that character's hipness or geekiness.  It happened all the time in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  If it's short enough, it doesn't need a citation, but a longer passage may require permission and an acknowledgement.  And if the character says "D'oh!" all the time, is bald, lives for beer and doughnuts and works at a nuclear power plant...well, you'd better be either writing parody or on a certain show's writing staff.  Otherwise, that "D'oh!" is probably going to cost you some dough!

(Okay, that was lame.  I think I had a better ending the first time around.  Ah, well.)

Karen

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

Writer's Weekly Question
#13:

Where do you begin when you start a novel? Do you begin at the beginning or with the characters? Or do you begin with the setting? Where do you begin and do you start with a game plan?

Umm...umm...let me try to remember.  It's been a while since I truly started a novel.  Perhaps I should take this question on a case by case basis, and see what pattern develops.

The Simian:  You've probably never heard of this one, because I started it in 10th grade, and didn't get very far with it.  I think I had an idea for the premise, wrote the first page and the last page, probably made some notes - and gave up on it.  I guess you could say it began with a premise.

Heirs of Mâvarin:  I started The Tengrim Sword, which later became Heirs of Mâvarin, not long after I gave up on The Simian.  In a way, this second novel attempt began with the same premise as the first one.  This time, though, it wasn't, "What if a man turned into a gorilla?" but a slight variation: "What if a teenaged boy turned into a monster?"   This led to the writing of the opening scene of the novel, with Rani in the tree, the encounter with the tengrem, and the confrontation between the villagers and the second tengrem.  It was many years before I wrote a viable scene beyond page 70 or so, and the opening sequence has probably gone through at least 50 drafts since 1974.  At its core, though, it's the same opening that I started with in writing the novel, all those years ago.

Mages of Mâvarin:  I think the second Mâvarin novel started with an idea for the character Darsuma, and the related premise about how she could cause trouble for Our Heroes.  From there I wrote a two page listing of what I thought would happen to each major character, which ended up being mostly "A loves B, B loves C, C loves D and D loves A."  Then I wrote the opening scene, I think, and took it from there.  Very little of what I wrote in my two-page note turned out to be true.

Prince of Mâvarin:  At one point I started writing flashbacks of Lormarte's early years for Darsuma to experience as dreams.  Eventually I spun them off as the beginning of the prequel.  That's about as far as I've gotten with it.

The Mâvarin Revolutions:  All I have on this is a few notes, and part of the opening scene.

The Lives and Times of Joshua Wander:  This started with characters and a premise for a "live dungeon" D&D evening.  After successfully launching my mostly improvised non-player characters that night, I tried for years to write their story, without much success.  Again, I mostly had just characters, a premise, and part of an opening scene.  Thirty years later, I rewrote that opening scene from scratch and kept going.  I now have about, I don't know, perhaps 150 pages toward my first real non-Mâvarin novel.

So I guess it all comes down to a premise: basically characters and a situation, part of which plays out in an opening scene.  The novel, if any, starts from there.  And of course, Your Mileage May Vary.

Karen

Final stats on the final edit of Heirs of Mâvarin:

Ch	Title	Words	Pages	From	To
1	The Tengrem	11,853	37	1	37
2	The Truth	14,763	46	38	83
3	The Council	15,477	51	84	134
4	Prophecies and Revelations	12,790	44	135	178
5	Mages and Messages	13,561	46	179	224
6	Two Princesses	11,606	40	225	264
7	The Road and the City	11,053	39	265	303
8	Transformations	10,684	36	304	339
9	Family	10,185	34	340	373
10	Magic	9,202	31	374	404
11	Mind and Matter	12,772	43	405	447
12	Rescuers	13,924	49	448	496
13	War and Peace	12,874	44	497	540
	totals	160,744	540
	averages	12,364.9	41.54

Next step:  the query and cover letters, and the synopsis.

After that comes the scary part.

Karen

I have a stack of "Writer's Weekly Questions" I've been meaning to answer, but you know how busy I've been. I'm going to take a quick stab at the new one, and double back for the others another time.

Writer's Weekly Question #12:
Do you have an ideal reader? If so, how does this reader make a difference in your writing? Why do you trust them with your writing?

I'm not sure I buy into the "ideal" reader idea, but I have a couple of very good beta readers. Sara and Sarah have both given me genuinely useful feedback, ranging from typo corrections to overall impressions of certain characters, from comments on repetitive passages to reassurance that something is okay. I trust Sarah and Sara because they like my work, and yet are honest about what needs a rewrite or a tweak. Writing as I do in a genre that many people don't like, it's essential that my beta readers be "those who like that sort of thing." The feedback of someone who doesn't like fantasy fiction is unlikely to be useful, beyond the basics of "There's a typo on page 20."

But when I think of my ideal reader, the person who comes most to mind is Karen Funk Blocher. She's the one these books are written for, and it shows it the delight she takes in rereading favorite scenes late at night, when she should really be in bed.

Karen

But as I <--mistake, caught by beta reader. See comments.

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

...Using the "Update Journal" tab. Mojo Jojo's got nothing on me!

A couple of nights ago, I completely finished the final hand edit of my Heirs printout, the one I made for myself at the same time as the ones I sent out to friends a year or so ago. I'm hoping to get serious this weekend about doing the final edit in the actual manuscript documents, hm01.doc and so on through hm13.doc. Then I plan to submit the darn thing somewhere, for the first time in over a decade.

And then, maybe, I can get started cleaning up Mages!

Meanwhile, I've gotten most of tonight's JW email written. Now I need to get started on the actual typing. What the heck--it's only 2:30 AM!

Karen

I had major ideas a day or two ago about most of the rest of Mall of.  I'm very relieved!  It requires introducing Li into the plot at this late date, but I can live with that. The stuff I finally came up with makes sense, and it has potential for further complications as well as a semi-workable explanation and solution.  (At least, I think it does. I haven't actually written any of this down yet!)

I'm not going to tell you all about it now, but it works with what's already on the page, er, screen.

It even deals with the behavior and speech patterns of Cathy and friends during the journey in Joshua Wander's transdimensional castle.  I realized that as long as they're in Josh's castle, they're relatively protected from the intrusion of their other selves.  That's how they could make contemporary references while they were traveling, even though earlier they were more disoriented than that, more dissociated from their normal lives.

I'll still have to be careful to wrap it up without too many references to plot points from the books, but that should be do-able. The big plot point that will come up is that Li can do magic.  Can't do without that, or Rani's status as a tengrem.  But the cat's been out of that bag for some time anyway.

I've been reading/editing Heirs in the bathroom.  Damn, I love that book.  I know that sounds immodest, but I don't mean it that way.  Many years ago, John read a review that began, "For those who like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing they like."  I've always loved that.  A quick Google search attributes it (or the variant form, "People who like this sort of thing will find this is the sort of thing they like," to Abraham Lincoln.  G.B. Shaw gets the credit for it on at least one site, and the variant is also laid at the feet of Richard Nixon.  But whatever.  The point is, this Mâvarin stuff is the sort of thing I like.  I wrote it to be the sort of thing I like.  Therefore, I like it! 

I suppose I might not like it if the plot remained unviable, or it had other serious flaws due to my inability to actually make it into the sort of thing I like.  But it doesn't, not any more.  And furthermore, I think it's rather good!

Then again, for those who don't like this sort of thing, they will find that this is the sort of thing they don't like.  Oh, well.  I'll never win over people who hate fantasy novels.  I just hope these books eventually find their way into the hands of people who like them.

Karen

Today I sat in my doctor's office for half an hour, and in an examination room for another twenty minutes, before she finally got around to me. I spent part of the time with my eyes closed, and part of it writing a bit of Mall of Mavarin.  Well, in theory that's what I was writing.  But I decided today that I can't post it, at least not in Musings and in Messages. 

This is too bad, because it was a fun bit, all about the real Rani Fost.  It was supposed to be a "Meanwhile, back in Mavarin..." flashback scene.  The problem is that like the rest of Mall of, it all takes place after both Heirs and Mages.  This doesn't matter too much when we're in Dewitt with Carl and Cathy and Randy, but it matters in Mavarin.  People who haven't read Heirs would be completely flummuxed by my Rani scene,  and people currently reading Mages (ahem!) would have later parts of that story spoiled for them (or should I say YOU). 

So.  Two choices. 

1. I can post the Rani Fost scene here as a friends-only, or

2. I can not post it at all, and save it for possible future publication, if and when Mall of becomes a viable and complete story, sought after by my publisher due to the massive popularity of Heirs and Mages.  (Don't hold your breath.)

So?  What shall I do?  (And what am I gonna come up with for tomorrow night? That part of it's my problem, not yours.)

Karen

I gather that some of you couldn't get the Tell Me What To Do poll to work, and didn't feel like answering in comments or by email instead.  Well, since only Sara and Sarah offered me guidance on what I should be working on, I guess I'll try to muddle through by working on everything at once!

For example:  today I checked my email, went to work, mailed Harlan's envelope and Kooichi's package before lunch, thought about Chapter One of Heirs while rushing through my food, hurried back to the office, thought about Heirs some more while in line at the bank (and wished I'd brought something to write in), hurried back to the office again, and worked until 8:45 PM.  Here at home I'm blogging my second journal entry of the night.  Then I'll probably type up a little more of Joshua Wander, tackle the tricky addition to Heirs that I was thinking about earlier, wash my too-red hair and go to bed.  Busy day, huh?

Yep, I'm working on the this-time-I-mean-it final edit of Heirs of Mâvarin. I'm on page 18 of chapter one. The formerly blank facing page is filled with an addition to the test that doesn't want to fit in anywhere, in which Del hides from a couple of searchers outside the Ot Lôven.  Aside from problems working it into the existing text, there's the problem of how a 16-year-old boy and his 3-year-old horse are going to hide in a cornfield.  In my experience, corn is never really "as high as an elephant's eye."

At the same time, though, I have about two more installments of the JW serial to type up, plus more from the next part of the story (which I won't be posting). 

All that, plus 12-hour days at the office!  No wonder I'm tired!

Karen

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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

I'm going to be bad and make a quick posting here while at work. One of the things I will give up for Lent is posting from the office, something I shouldn't do anyway, whether it's Lent or not.

A couple of things:

1. Sometimes when I write or speak in a forum I find intimidating, I say things that I later consider mawkish and embarrassing. For example, I sounded stupid and foolish many years ago at a county hearing on buffer zones of limited development at the edges of Tucson. I did it again years later during a jury duty selection, when I expressed, badly and irrelevantly, my opposition to capital punishment. And I think I probably came off equally badly in a couple of recent comments to the second Making Light posting about Atlanta Nights. Sometimes I should just not say anything.

2. New rule of writing for someone who doesn't believe in rules of writing: since nearly any work in progress is neither as good nor as bad as the author hopes or worries that it is, it is probably a bad idea to shelve it the day that self-doubt (a.k.a. the Inner Weasel) or even a negative critique shakes your confidence in it. Conversely, it's probably a good idea to set it aside at some point, when one is either seriously "stuck" or almost finished with it. A little time away may give the perspective needed to see that 1) this is actually rather good after all, and 2) these bits need to be rewritten and those typos need to be fixed. My personal experience here is that shelving something sometimes gives one time to learn the craft better, if and only if one continues writing other things in the meantime. However, I can't recommend writing a novel on the 31-year-plan.

3. I'll be submitting a revision of Meet Joshua Wander to F&SF. Should I disclose that I haven't submitted to that magazine in 30 years?

4. I've got to get Heirs submitted somewhere before I get busy again. Scary stuff.

Karen