Category: Books

Another Update on Hawk: Now I’m Scared

I’m significantly past the halfway point in the rough draft, and I’ve trimmed most of the flab from it, which means I feel good about what’s left.  It’s a more dense book then some of the recent ones, I think just because the nature of the story demands a certain compression of events; it wants to keep moving.  And I am really packing on the hope-this-works stuff. By which I mean, “I’m going to throw this in as key plot point; I sure hope by the end I know why it’s there.”

In the past, I’ve pretty regularly done that, and it’s worked out well.  Sometimes I’ve had to chop things that ended up not fitting, but more often than not throwing something in just because it felt cool worked out: my subconscious would come charging in on a white horse and say, “You need that thing! Thank god it’s there!”  With this book I am, quite deliberately, piling a lot of them on top of each other; not since Taltos have I been this worried about whether the stuff I’m setting up will all come out.

I’m having fun.  With any luck, the reader will too.

I picked up the bloody pile and made my way down the stairs, passing through my lab, where I took the opportunity to burn it all before continuing out onto the streets of Adrilankha, where waited death and, you know, stuff like that.

 

Progress Report on Hawk, or, Kids, Don’t Try This at Home

I’ve been doing exactly what you’re not supposed to do: going back and reworking things before getting to the end.  But it’s okay, I’m a trained professional.

Seriously.  Remember that scythe I was talking about before?  Well, I went and pulled it out and hacked the first two chapters to pieces and put them back together more powerful than I could imagine.  Since then, things have been falling into place nicely, though it’s sometimes taken a bit of teeth gnashing.  Now I have less than half the book done again, but I’m feeling worlds better about what I have. There’s a structure I like, and it’s tasting good.  I am cautiously optimistic.

“Boss, What’s going on?”
“Where are you?”
“Half a mile up on an updraft, almost over the Ocean-sea.  What’s–”
“Stay there for a bit.”
“Boss–”
“Just for a bit.”
I looked around the area again, carefully.  I moved around just enough to make sure the spindly trees and weeds weren’t concealing anyone.
“What’s going on, Boss?”
“A fluffy kitten tea party.”
“Boss–”
“Just wait.”

New on the Site: Books!

Jen has just finished updating the “Books” section of the blog, so now I provide links to various places to buy them.  It’s pleasant to see all the various links–ebook, audible, all that stuff.  I’m still hoping to get the earlier Vlad novels out as ebooks; but we’ll have to see what happens.  Meanwhile, thanks Jen.  Have a cookie.

 

Jerry: Why don’t we insert links for some classics?  Hawthorne, Dostoevsky, maybe some Dickens.

Ms. Pennyworth: Jerry, does that sound like something that will help the client?  This client?  Does he even fucking read Hawthorne, Jerry?

Jerry: I like Hawthorne.

Ms. Pennyworth: Is anyone asking what you like, Jerry?  Do you know what classic unemployment is, Jerry?  Would you like to be limiting your reading to want-ads, Jerry?

[Enter squirrel]

Squirrel: I could have done those links.

Ms. Pennyworth: No, you fucking couldn’t have done those links.  You’re a fucking squirrel.

[Exit squirrel]

 

 

All Right, Yeah, I’m a Conservative

I really am.  Those who know me well already know that, but for the rest of you, let me explain.

There is what one believes, and then there are one’s natural inclinations.  And all of my inclinations are suspicious of change. Not against change; suspicious of it.  I scowl when new words are coined, and demand that they justify themselves.  In music, I grimace and tap my foot impatiently at drum machines and atonality.

In Texas Hold ’em, I still call the fourth community card “fourth street” and the fifth one “fifth street” instead of “the turn” and the “the river” respectively. Why? Because I do, that’s why.

In politics, yeah, I’m a Red, but I’m an old-school Red: an orthodox Trotskyist, a traditional Marxist. I believe that the proletariat is the revolutionary class, that the falling rate of profit causes market crashes, that history is best understood as the struggle to wrest human wants from nature, that the materialist dialectic is the best general explanation we have for matter in motion, and that explanations for social phenomena that don’t start with the class struggle are liable to be vacuous. I disliked the New Left when it was New; and I still dislike it now that it’s no longer Left.  Post-modernism and identity politics I find easy to hate, because both my inclination and my reasoned beliefs line up (as opposed to language and music, where, really, I wish I were more comfortable with change).

And in fiction, I am quite fine with both reading and telling stories. I feel like all fiction ought be stories. I do not believe that; I believe that there is room  for all sorts of experimenting and wild, weird stuff. But what I want are stories. I want to write them and then see them published in books.  You know, the kind people hold, and turn the pages, and read? And I want them sold in book stores where people browse; and I want them in libraries where people can pull them off the shelves and consider checking them out; and I want them in used book stores where people who can’t afford new books can try new authors without going broke.

I approve of the new stuff, of e-books, of certain alternate publishing strategies. I think, long-term, they will probably have a positive effect on the quality of stories; but I’m not comfortable with them.

Because, at heart, however much I wish I weren’t, I’m a conservative.