Never mind that I didn't mention this on Day One, Two, or Three. I only decided to do this on Day Three, having accidentally started on it two days before. From now until circumstances prevent it, I intend to spend at least an hour a night working on one or more of the Mâvarin books. The last two nights it's been an hour and a half; I didn't think to time myself on nights one and two.

The bulk of Mages of Mâvarin - a thousand pages, give or take a few - and some of Heirs as well, come from a period of about two and a half years circa 1999-2002. I was writing or editing every single night during that era, and hanging out on the old AOL fantasy & sf writers' board with Patricia C. Wrede and a passel of fellow unknowns. I only missed two days in all that time: the day I got my gall bladder out, and the night I was on suicide watch after my friend's husband ditched her. Most days I was handwriting scenes at lunchtime, and typing or revising at night.

Then in late 2002 I went back to school, and had a ton of homework to do, including a paper a week. Suddenly I had to channel all that time and effort and discipline to GEN 300 and the courses that followed. I didn't have time to put into the novels while doing all that, and in any case I was kind of stuck on the handful of scenes still needed for Mages. So I mostly stopped working on it. It's been three and a half years since I graduated from UoP, but since then I've spent my evenings blogging and doing other online stuff. Although I've worked on the books intermittently, and submitted Heirs to two publishers, I've never gotten back into the routine of writing and editing fiction on a nightly basis.

So here's the deal. I know from bitter experience that I'm not terribly good at carrying out my big plans and grand promises after I announce them. So I'm not promising that this will last. But right now I'm unemployed, and I'm getting adequate sleep; I'm interested, and I have the time. There is no reason I can't get some editing in on a daily basis, at least until I get another job. After that, we'll see.

Maybe this is the start of another long, productive streak of continuous effort.

Karen

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!

Where I am in all the writing-related stuff I should be working on:

Heirs of Mâvarin - have not heard back from Tor; it's been 14 months now. According to what I've been reading, I should count that as a rejection and query widely. Haven't done that yet.

Mages of Mâvarin (trilogy) - I'm on chapter two in my edit, but it's not as bad as it sounds. Just last night I did a light edit on Chapter 33. This time I'll be putting chapters in a file as I finish, so that I don't keep starting over with Chapter One.

The Mâvarin Revolutions - still on Chapter One, but it's growing. It's up to 14 pages now, probably a third of that typed in the past week or so. This morning I planned the next bit in the "A Fire in Mâvarin" sequence as I walked to One Stop Automotive.

To Rule Mâvarin (alternate title Prince of Mâvarin (prequel) - stalled out for now.

I  haven't been posting much on LJ recently, but I hope to start using it for benchmarking my progress.  This is #1 in the series.

I expect I'll write about this on both blogs tonight. I was going to try not to be too repetitious, but on second thought I think I'll just crosspost, mostly.

There is a Doctor Who episode, "The Girl in the Fireplace," in which the Doctor visits Madame de Pompadour at key moments throughout her short life.  For him it all happens in less than a day, but, as she remarks, she experiences the relationship from the perspective of "the slow path."  My contrasting experiences with my last two submissions of Heirs of Mâvarin has me thinking about the fast path and the slow path, and which one is better  in this particular context.

      A timeline of the slow path:

• February 20, 2006: mailed cover letter, three chapters and synopsis of Heirs of Mâvarin to Tor Books in NYC.
• February 23, 2006: the submission package arrived at Tor, according to the USPS, and was presumably consigned to the slush pile.
• February 28, 2006: eight days have passed, and the book hasn't been rejected yet, this time around.  The last time I mailed it out (an earlier draft back in the late 1990s), it was back in my mailbox exactly one week later. 
• June 23, 2006: the four month anniversary of the slush pile arrival marks the first date I can reasonably think that I might hear back on the submission, based on the "at least four to six months" mentioned in the Tor FAQ. Nothing happens.
• August 23, 2006: six months out, the "at least" part of that phrase kicks in.  Hey, it doesn't say "at most."  I consider whether it's time to query about the status of the submission, but decide to hold off.
• January 1, 2007: someone I admire but have never met offers to ask PNH of Tor about my submission. I say yes, and thank him in advance.
  
• January 4, 2007: I follow up by snail mail, politely asking the status of my submission.
• January 7, 2007 (date approximate): someone I admire but have never met actually does ask PNH about my submission.
• January 9, 2007: my contact reports back that PNH "did recall" the submission.
• February 23, 2007: I celebrate the one-year anniversary of the submission's arrival on the slush pile by designing a humorous anniversary card. I decide that the longer I wait, the more likely it is that it will not be rejected out of hand.  It occurs to me that I once sold a logic problem to Dell over two years after submitting it.
• March 20, 2007: I celebrate the 13-month anniversary of the package's initial mailing by emailing a query to an agent who prefers to operate by email.

     A timeline of the fast path:

• March 13, 2007: I read an article from Writer's Digest Online about agents seeking new clients.  I save the info to a file, narrowed down to the three that match my needs (i.e., they handle Fantasy, SF and YA)
• March 17, 2007: after working on it in my head for a few days, I write Version 1 of the query, and send to a few friends for feedback.
• March 20, 2007, 8:54 PM:  After good advice from my friends, careful study of the agent's guidelines and multiple revisions, I email the query. I spend the rest of the evening updating my mavarin.com entry page and my online bio, in case the agent peeks at either.
  
• March 21, 2007, 7:39 PM: I get an emailed "standard rejection letter," identical to the one the agent posted on her blog sometime in the past week. It's a nicely worded, encouraging letter, but it's still a form rejection, the same one I would have received had I sent a 20-page, misspelled horror of a query promoting a gerbil cookbook, a foundation document for a new religion, and fifty other unlikely projects.

So which is better, the fast path or the slow path?  It's kind of hard to be sure, because I'm still on the slow path. If it ends the same way as the fast path, with a form rejection and no feedback, then it will be a far greater disappointment than the one received in less than a day. But like that logic problem, my slush pile submission may be making its glacial way toward a good result.  Let's hope so, anyway.

As for the quick path, I'm thinking, as it begins to rain here, that it is possible to find at the end of it, not a pot of gold or even a rainbow, but a pewter lining in place of a silver one. At least I didn't have much time to get my hopes up.  At least I've now worked out a pretty good query to send out, even though it didn't do the job this time.  At least I have a few more places to try, and no more need to wait for this one to respond before trying the next.

And maybe it doesn't matter what I think, either of the fast path or the slow one.  It's not as if I get to choose which one to travel on. Some publishers and agents tend to respond quickly, others slowly.  Some individual examples may be highly variable in this respect, depending on the submission and the circumstances. Even if it is possible to find out which publishers and agents respond more quickly or more slowly than others, the info shouldn't be a deciding factor as one prepares to address the envelope or the email. I will gladly wait two years for a "yes" answer from a good agent or a mass market publisher, if that's what it takes. If it's a no, then sooner is better, but it's not something to aim for.  Better to get on with editing Mages and writing Revolutions, and try not to obsess about timelines. The reply will get here when it gets here. 

Dang, I'm depressed.

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

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

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

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

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