Archive for category Fiction

I had no pressing work to do yesterday, so at long last I had the opportunity to read over my completed draft of Shards of Heaven. I wanted to give it another once-over before making a big agent push this year. I meant to do it months ago, but I’ve been tied up with Brunanburh.

You know what, though? I think the novel is pretty good. I was actually moved a couple of times, which is a darn fine feeling. On the other hand, I’ve scribbled corrections throughout the manuscript, including a mighty mark through the Prologue. ‘Tis going the way of the dodo.

After that, though, I’m moving on. Time to start querying this one — something I intended to have done long before now.

So I decided, somewhere on the long trip out West, that Shards of Heaven needed a glossary. Nothing on a Tolkien scale, mind you, but at least a basic historical who’s who, since the majority of the novel’s characters — even bit players — are based on real people.

The glossary, I’m pleased to say, is complete.

While I’m tempted now to immerse myself in Gate of Hell, the sequel to Shards — yes, some significant work was done on it while I was away — I’m finding myself more interested in two other novel projects: one the heavy revision of a completed fantasy novel and one the significant expansion of my award-winning science fiction story, “The Keeper Alone.”

Which one will I settle into, I wonder?

I thought today, for no good reason at all, about the Novel-writing sketch by Monty Python.  The “video” below is audio only, but it still gets the point across:

I recently received a rejection from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, for my deliberate deus ex machina tale, “At the End of Babel.”  A bummer, of course, since I still think it’s a very fine piece, and I’d like to see it in print.

That said, there is a small victory here.  F&SF is a fast-rejection market, often with response times measured in single-digit days.  This speed, as writers know, is largely due to the efficiency of the mag’s chief slush reader, John Joseph Adams — known hereabouts as the Tri-Lettered One, since he signs his alas-o-gram rejects “JJA.”  My small victory in this rejection, therefore, is that my rejection came not from JJA but from the Editor/Publisher of F&SF, Gordon Van Gelder.  Even more, it took 52 days.

In the absence of anything from me, why don’t you go read Mary Robinette Kowal’s Hugo-nominated short story, “Evil Robot Monkey”? Better yet, why don’t you listen to it, read by the author herself?

…and I’m revising the opening chapters of Shards of Heaven. Yippee!

Glenn’s recent comment on another thread reminds me that I’m overdue not only in posting new material but also in explaining the state of things on the fiction front.

Gate of Hell, the sequel to the completed Shards of Heaven, is in rather fine outline, and I had started writing it.

Only, well, I’ve stopped.

There are several reasons for this. One, of course, is the press of the semester. Another is the academic side of my life, which has seen me dealing with quite a few little things in addition to the big one of the Battle of Brunanburh book.

A bigger issue, though, has been my hesitancy to devote a great deal of time to writing a sequel to an unpublished book. I’m currently seeking representation to alleviate that lack of publication, but thus far no attempts have struck gold. The first agent I queried requested a hefty partial of the MS, held it, held it, held it, then said “no.” The second agent declined the partial. The third agent has the query right now.

I also wonder — and recent events with a now-novelist friend of mine bears this out — that it might be a good idea if I have multiple novels at hand when it comes time for shopping my services. As Mary Robinette Kowal puts the matter, it would be a good idea to have an answer if an agent or an editor rejects one novel but is interested to know if I have something else I can show them.

So the work spread out on my desk at the moment is my dusty half-novel Odalisk and Basilisk, retrieved from oblivion for consideration as my next fictive mistress. It’s interesting to see old material like this after a long time apart from it. It’s… intriguing.

There’s been a flurry of articles in the mainstream media lately about the future of publishing; in particular, the e-book revolution is much in the air.

I find this interesting. First, because I’m just intellectually fascinated by such transitions and the human mind. Second, because I’ve been thinking for several months now about the possibility of self-publishing.

That term used to be a dirty word, of course. It rings of vanity publishing, which isn’t what I’m aiming for at all. Quite to the contrary. Vanity publishing is where you pay money to see your work in print. Self-publishing, to my thinking, is where you get to keep more of the money when your work sees print.

What’s held me back — what’s held back most folks from going the self-pub route (other than perceived stigma, which I could care less about) — is the fact that a publisher-published book is far and away more likely to sell more copies than a self-published book. So while the author gets a much smaller cut of the pie in publisher-publishing, the pie is so much bigger that it doesn’t matter.

What I keep coming back to, though, is whether that’s changing. E-books are, whether we like it or not, the future. And e-books don’t have the distribution networks required in traditional publishing. You can theoretically distribute direct, from the author to the reader, point to point, with no middlemen. Even if you do utilize a middleman — say, Amazon, for the Kindle — the percentages are higher (35% of cover for the Kindle Store).

But then there’s something else, too: we live in a viral world. What if that viral passing of material could include, say, a book? It would need to be free, of course, but imagine if a book went viral, reader to reader, downloaded, copied, recopied, around the globe. Released in Creative Commons, people would be free to translate it, to play with it, to do whatever-the-heck-they-wanted-to with it, so long as they didn’t profit. The author, meanwhile, would utilize the resulting traffic to make money via advertising click-throughs, merchandising, and actual print copies of the viral book (I’ve bought CDs of material I downloaded for free, after all). The e-copy could be formatted by the author, and the print copy, too, could be self-published on demand and shipped direct to readers.

What kind of book would work for such a thing? An entertaining one, obviously, but also one that has an edge of anti-establishment to it. Better still, it would have many plot-threads with lots of cliff-hangers. Ideally, it would be full of things that could be linked, so that the text itself could become a kind of jumping-off point in hundreds of interesting directions, embedding itself into the interwoven virtual worlds of the Web.

Perhaps I’ve been spending too much time reading things on my iPod Touch, but I think it just. might. work.