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!

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

Subject: Happy Half Anniversary to my Slush Pile Submission

Dear Patrick et al.:

Greetings from Tucson, where the monsoon is still, um, monsooning. According to the postal service, Tor received my cover letter, three chapters and synopsis six months ago this week. I'm far from panicked about this, but it's time for a follow-up inquiry.

The book's title is Heirs of Mâvarin. The manuscript was in a large Priority Mail envelope, sent February 21, 2006. An equally large SASE was enclosed.

I have a longish list of theories about why I haven't heard back yet, but it's less entertaining and informed than the equivalent list in "Slushkiller," so we'll skip it. I'm hoping that the slush pile is simply more backed up than usual - or, better yet, that my submission has been opened, perused and reported on favorably, and now awaits an editor's attention.

When you get a moment, will you please check on the status of my manuscript and let me know where we are in the process? Thanks!

Karen Funk Blocher
(contact info)

or...

First, let me get this meme code pasted in:

Greed:	Very Low
Gluttony:	Medium
Wrath:	Very Low
Sloth:	Medium
Envy:	Very Low
Lust:	Very Low
Pride:	Very Low

Take the Seven Deadly Sins Quiz

Gee, gluttony and sloth. That was predictable. Enough said.

I am writing again, which is to say that I'm getting some new edits in on Mages from Mâvarin. I'm on Chapter Three now. That's not at all impressive when you consider there are 35 chapters in all, but it's a start. It's also occurred to me this past week that despite my relative inactivity on the book(s), the overall manuscript has changed quite a bit in the two years since I sent printouts and CDs to beta readers. It will change more as I go on. The trade-off is that the fiction blog is languishing. I need to get Jace and Sandy moving again, but somehow the evenings go by without my gtiving either of them a visit.

As far as the book editing goes, I've made one change in my working methods. For the past four years or so, I've been printing out chapters, reading and hand-editing them, and, in theory, entering some version of those edits into the Word files - later. The problem was, I constantly lost track of where I was in the process, not to mention all those messy loose printouts. There's no good place to put them by my computer, so entering the edits was where I had the bottleneck. I ended up starting over, lots of times, until I was sick to death of the first five pages of Chapter One. It is better, though.

So that didn't work, and I'm trying something else. Except when I come to a scene that only exists in handwritten form (I think I still have a few of these), I'm editing directly in Word now. Sure, it means I'm stuck at my computer, but I'm there all night anyway. Making the changes in one pass instead of two might mean that the manuscript will be one draft less polished, but it doesn't seem to be working out that way so far. I can change the same passage five times in five minutes it necessary, and never run out of white space on the page. If Sara or Sarah is online, I can even run each version of the paragraph by a faithful beta reader for advice. Yeah, this is working better.

Well, except for the part where I'm sidetracked by Wikipedia.

Karen

On Saturday, Tor will have had my three-chapters-and-synopsis for 5 months.  I choose to call that good news.  It means one of eight things:

1. It's still sitting unopened in the slush pile.
2. It's made it past minimal scrutiny (it's typed and has a SASE, etc.) and awaits further examination.
3. A first reader looked at the first page or so and didn't hate it, and will look at it in more detail later.
4. A first reader actually liked it, but hasn't written a report on the submission yet.
5. A first reader has written it up and passed it on to Patrick (or possibly Teresa, or someone else), who will look at it eventually.
6. Patrick has glanced at it, but hasn't decided yet whether to ask for the rest of the book.
7. A rejection is on its way.
8. A request for the rest of the book is on its way.

Only one of these options would actually be bad news.

Karen

Okay, so nobody commented on the Writer's Weekly Question essay thingy I slaved over on Monday. Did anyone read it? I have no idea. That's what I get for putting it on the LJ instead of the Outpost, but I had toi do it. This is what Inspirations is for, aside from the occasional meme. This is where I'm supposed to be writing about writing.

Now here it is Friday (actually Saturday, because it's past midnight now), and Jess has posted a new question, inspired by my latest Harlan Ellison encounter:

Writer's Weekly Question #15:
Name a few famous writers you have had an up-close-and-personal encounter with. Did the encounter have an impact on you and your writing in some way? If so, how?

I could write a whole series a posts answering this, and probably have. Heck, I haven't even exhaused the subject of my experiences with Harlan Ellison yet. But yes, I've met other writers over the years, and yes, they've had an effect. In brief:

• Robin Scott Wilson co-founded the Clarion SF Writer's Workhsop. He taught the first week of Clarion '77, the year I was there.I actually don't remember anything specific that I'm sure he said and nnot somebody else, but it was all very informative and encouraging at the time. He may habe been the one who said that "The truth is no excuse." The fact that something has happened in real life doesn't make it believable in fiction. You have to make it work dramatically. Good advice, that.  There were a numbers of good bits like that at Clarion, catch phrases encapulating little principles, traps and techniques.  29 years later, though, I can't be sure which writers were behind which bon mots.
  
• Peter S. Beagle taught the third week of Clarion that year. Aside from Harlan, he was the writer I most wanted to meet. This was because a) I loved his books, and b) he was a fantasy writer, and I was already at work on my own fantasy novel. You know the one. But crushingly, Beagle didn't like my opening chapters of The Tengrim Sword, as it was called then. Worse, he couldn't even tell me why he didn't like it! He couldn't tell me much of anything, really. He was mostly an instinctive writer,not a technician. He had no advice for me, no encouragement. I did enjoy hearing him read from his work, though. And it was a bit of a revelation to know what someone can write that well without having specific, objective techniques to pass on to others. On the other hand, I heard that at least one other Clarionite learned a lot from him. Why couldn't I do so, too?
• Algis J Budrys (shown at right) - writer, reviewer, critic - taught the fourth week. We called him Ayjay. One of my favorite bits of plotting advice comes from him, I think: "Get your protagonist up a tree; throw rocks at him; get him out of the tree." He liked what I'd done so far on the novel, which did a lot to repair the damage to my confidence that Pete Beagle had caused. Another interestiing thing about him was that he'd written a book I liked, called The Falling Torch. What I like about it was that the protagonist spent two thirds of the book trying to decide what to do. Once he finally decided to go to war, I turned the page, and the fighting was already basically over! I loved the idea that the decisuion was the important thing, not the actual battle. But Ayjay told me an editor had cut a third of the book!
  
• Kate Wilhelm and Damon Knight (he's the guy with the beard, right) taught the last two weeks together. I don't remember a darn thing Kate taught, but she cooked a great London Broil for John and me one night. in aid of our Atkins diet. Damon seemed to contradict a lot of the writing advice we'd had to that point, even some of his own. He also discouraged the heck out of me when he said he had theimpression that Mâvarin ended "ten feet beyond the road." I disagreed strongly, but the truth is that I wasn't big on concrete detail in those days. I've worked hard over the years to overcome my talking heads syndrome, in large part because of Damon's remark. Damon also taught about the business side of writing, which I found more helpful at the time than the actual writing advice. Oddly, though, I've since bought a book of Damon's writing advice, and it all resonates with me, nearly thirty years later.
  

I'll probably come back to this subject later. I have more to say, but I'm very sleepy now.

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

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

First off, a quiz result:

You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes. Moya (Farscape) 100% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 94% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 81% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 69% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 69% SG-1 (Stargate) 63% Serenity (Firefly) 63% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 56% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 50% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 44% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 38% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 31% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

I'm satisfied with this result. The folks on Moya would be more fun and less antagonistic or dark then on B5 or Serenity, let alone Galactica. I snagged this from plittle, who thinks he got it from Shelly.

While we're on the subject of memes, here's a reminder:  please select words for my Johari window if you haven't already.   Thanks!

I finally got to Texas Roadhouse for lunch today, after the Red Cross rejected my blood again with a low iron level.  Figured I needed some red meat!  While there I did something I haven't done in a restaurant in a while.  I worked on a novel.  Which one?  Well, obviously not Heirs.  Mages, too, had no missing scenes I was prepared to write without rereading. 

Heh, heh, heh.  That's right.  I wrote the opening scene of Restoration of Mâvarin, possibly called The Mâvarin Revolutions. It's the third book.  Or fourth, if you count the prequel.

Oh, yeah.  I'm in trouble now!

Karen

Writer's Weekly Question #14:

Has there ever been a story or other creative work you've built and had to do any sort of research for (this does not include essays or papers for school)? How far did you have to go to complete the research and did it improve your overall work in any way?

Well, of course I did a lot of research when I was writing about Quantum Leap.  I used to drive John crazy, playing a bit of dialogue over an over to transcribe it, so I could report something about Al's fourth wife or where in New Mexico the Project was or evidence for the body leaping instead of just the mind.   I also kept a decade's worth of TV Guides on hand for research into guest stars and air dates. I even bought back editions of all four volumes of the Academy Players Directory to help me visually match guest star names to their characters. 

This was long before IMDb, of course.

I've done considerably less research for the fiction, but there's been some.  In college I specifically chose to study climatology and astronomy in order to get the worldbuilding right.  Both courses were difficult, dull, and useless, it turned out.  I've read about mead, which nobody drinks in Mâvarin anyway that I've noticed.  I've asked questions of a blacksmith in Colonial Williamsburg, and researched blacksmiths online. I've picked the brains of someone who used to groom horses for a living, and gathered info as best I could on how far a caravan is likely to travel in a day.

Did it improve the book?  Probably.  But it's all very superficial.  I still don't know anything much about what kind of food is likely to be available in a western hemisphere inn with roughly eighteenth century technology, whether the lighting is by candle, kerosine lamp or oil lamp, or what a bed is filled with, and how often.  So I think it through as best I can - and then I fake it.

Is that wrong?

Karen

Wehe iije sibio gqatyji.
Wehe iije sibio gqatyji. Jeyraela fayubi ginu giyzuge. Yovowuqe pysbotbe
ryw faje arima ikowip. Uiyey gyo exy, yuyku nacute y liyuy. ...

I'm thinking that's a transposition code, rather than a language. The page it's from no longer exists, but I saved the cached version of the page. It's all like that. One thing that intrigues me about it is that the word "fayubi" is preceded by the word "Jeyraela", which if read aloud would sound like the name of Masha's mother in Heirs of Mâvarin.


There was also a link farm - well, sort of a link farm, except that it doesn't have much by way of links:

The Seer And The Sword Supersite
Fayubi the (and Fabi the Innkeeper) - Fayubi the (born Fabi Stok) Art by Sherlock
First Appearance: Heirs of Mâvarin up and go over to his saddlebags, ...
auctions.dunningadvertising.com/listings/the-seer-and-the-sword.htm

Actually following the link in that one brings me to some truly deightful gibberish:

Fayubi the (and Fabi the Innkeeper) - Fayubi the (born Fabi Stok) Art by Sherlock First Appearance: Heirs of Mâvarin up and go over to his saddlebags, where his was. He began to pack his gear as if nothing.

not to mention

Strange Author Encounters - I'm still writing the 4th THE book, PLAY. Should hit the 100 page mark today if I get busy writing. A week ago I had a great time at an annual children's writing conference in Los Angeles.

and

The Brahan - His Prophecies - He applied to a local female , who informed him that he "would die by the " (le bas a chlaidheamh). This appeared to be improbable in the case of such an old man, who had taken part in so.

and


Fish --spotted spanish mackerel - CuttleFish --- Red-Snapper --- Emperor --- Moon Tail --- -Fish --- -Fish --- King-Fish --- Trigger-Fish --- Reef-Cod Squid --- Chilean Sea Bass --- Red Fin Bream --- Sea-Crab.

Okay, guys.  I'm sure that's all really helpful to Victoria Hanley fans - especially since none of these snippets have live links!

Also, according to this page, Victoria Hanley is the author of the book The and the.

Returning to Google,

Did you mean: Ayubi 

Heh, heh, heh.


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

As a few of you know by now, one of my Christmas gift craft projects was a Mâvarin calendar. Each page has a Sherlock character portrait and a bit of "Mâvarin Missives" text. Most of these snippets are reprinted from my Mâvarin Fiction Entry series, in a few cases edited to fit the page, but two of the calendar bits are brand new.

One thing I especially liked about this calendar was adapting the actual calendar part to cover both our Copernican system of days and dates and the Mâvarinû one. Years ago I worked out an exact one-to-one correspondence between their dates and ours, so that I could look up what day goes with any given date, and keep track of when everything happens overall. My "weekmonth" doc looks something like this:

Comerdu, 6th Day of Bupek, 870 MMY = Lore meets Jor
Friday, June 6th, 1975

and

Nishmudu, 5th Day of Genorem, 881 MMY = Rani is born
= Sunday, January 5th, 1986
next day: Masheldu, 6th Day of Genorem, 881 MMY

I also have a doc called FabiTime, which reveals that Fabi was Robed as Fayubi in 870 MMY, and that his grandson Tuli was born in 886 MMY.

Now, all this is kind of fun for me, and helps to prevent inconsistencies. But when I did the calendar, I had a little bit of a shock. You seen, Heirs of Mâvarin takes place in 896 MMY, Mages in 897. So what's the Mâvarin year of of 2006 calendar? 901 MMY! That means that my Mâvarin dates are already outdated, by my standards, although it doesn't really matter, and few people, of any, will even notice.

Still, it gets me to wondering: what happens to Rani and friends in 901 MMY? Will it take me another decade to find out?

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

In solidarity with most of the AOL-J community, I will be doing my daily blogging elsewhere now. Overnight, AOL added banner ads to the journals of all the paid subscribers. Everyone is ticked off in a major way. Some people have taken their journals private so that nobody can read them. Some people have posted protests in their journal descriptions and elsewhere, to make the journals unattractive to advertisers. Some people are leaving, or planning to leave. Some people are going to wait and see what happens next before deciding.

I'm not shutting down Musings, but I will be posting elsewhere instead for a while, maybe more-or-less forever.

The new digs:

Outpost Mâvarin

See you there!

Karen

P.S. Sara, are you going to post anything at all before your surgery? I'm starting to worry!

Tonight's the night I post Chapter One, Scene One of the "final final" draft of Heirs of Mâvarin, over on the other two blogs.  I decided to do this for three reasons:

1. I wanted to give myself a break from writing new fiction every week, so I'd be free to concentrate on Heirs and/or Mages.

2. I wanted to promote the books themselves.

3. I wanted to show readers my best work, as opposed to the flawed serials and the cryptic first person entries.

Trouble is, there are problems with all of these purposes:

1.  Show of hands: who is surprised that I've barely even glanced at Heirs this week?  I've made some notes in my printout of the first volume of Heirs, but that's it, really.  Instead I've done more Black Rose Kate bits, and spent an entire evening creating magazine covers for and writing blubs about Mâvarin Monthly and the The Journal of Contemporary Time Travel.  I suppose that means the fiction-y part of my brain is aroused, but this new stuff is distracting me from the two books.

2. What books?  How is it helpful to promote something that isn't yet available for sale?

3.  I'm blowing my wad here.  What if people aren't impressed?  What if nobody comments?  I no longer had the excuse that it's not my best work!

Well, I'll just have to schedule in time for the editing and rewrites, and overcome my insecurities to finish and sell the damn books!  What I really need to do is unplug from the modem and take the computer and printouts somewhere, so I can work without distractions.

Show of hands: how many people think I will actually do this?


Karen