I struggle to give credit to all the important work that is part of writing.
I think that work can be roughly sorted into three categories:
Continue readingCategory Archives: Writing
David Drake, 1945-2023
Rest in peace, David Drake. May your memory be a blessing.
I did not know David Drake, but I knew his work. I reviewed a number of his books here. Recently, when a friend was looking for a very particular flavor of genre fiction, I recommended Drake. I said, “He may not write the most poetic or literary story, and you might be able to spot tropes from a long ways off, but damn does he know how to drive plot.”
From what little I know about Drake’s writing habits and his collaborations, I admire him. He apparently knew the arc of each story well enough to write detailed plot outlines (there’s a free example here), and would then hand those off to his collaborator and take second billing. He thus helped other writers get published and break into the market. Eric Flint, if my memory of various author’s notes serves, found those outlines to be extremely helpful with their shared Belisarius series.
David Drake also clearly wrote to release some of the awfulness he’d experienced while serving in Vietnam, especially in his Hammer’s Slammers series. He was of the generation of genre authors, especially military fiction authors, whose lives had been turned sideways by the war. His post here from 2009 states his feelings about the war pretty eloquently.
Relatedly, I appreciate Drake’s military fiction; its sense of grim loneliness and futility, blended with camaraderie and the occasional glimpse of something more admirable, feels like a fitting portrait of war. It fits with what I’ve heard from my veteran friends who’ve been in combat. Unlike other mil-fic I’ve read, Drake’s stories don’t pretend that there’s some inner nobility or heroism inherently brought out by war. Nor does he pretend that wars accomplish much good.
I never dug deeper into David Drake’s political leanings. Given my frustration with other mil-fic authors, perhaps I wanted to protect myself from unwanted knowledge. It’s easier for me to read Drake’s work and appreciate it when I don’t feel immediately repelled by him. We’ll see whether I risk learning more. It won’t happen today.
If you want to read Drake’s books, you can find some of them here in the Baen Free Library. I can’t recommend the Larry Correia or John Ringo titles that appear nearby without wreathing my recommendation in enough caveats to float a lead brick. Stick with David Drake instead.
Filler, fight scenes, and Marvel fluff
I practiced stage combat years ago. I know how to choreograph a decent fight. I love watching skilled practitioners strut their stuff. This is why I love watching old Jackie Chan movies and the John Wick series, why I marvel at Olympic gymnasts or any other athletes where I have some basic understanding of just how utterly awesome these people are at what they do. I appreciate skill, and I admire craft.
Making a big blockbuster action sequence takes a lot of work, and can be done well. Sometimes I like that style. The first time I watched the first Avengers movie, I don’t think I was aware that the climactic fight took over twenty minutes. I enjoyed the spectacle, appreciated the work put into it, and didn’t care about how long it ran.
But many of those climactic fights feel like filler. Maybe I’ve seen too many Marvel movies, consumed them past the point of satiation. Or maybe…
Continue readingThe back-into-it roundup, 11/2/23
There’s a wall that builds itself. It stands between me and my creative work. If I pass through it every day, I can knock it down a little with each trip—moving past it is never effortless, but the wall doesn’t have a chance to grow that much. If I don’t pass through for a while, the wall climbs and solidifies. Pushing past it gets harder the longer I wait.
I shared that image, that metaphor, with Ley when it came to me recently. They nodded, and suggested the metaphor of a quickly-overgrown path that I need to frequently bushwhack and clear. That works for me too.
I’ve been busy doing other work for a week or so. I didn’t think that would be such a distraction from my other writing, but it was. Fortunately, I had the Monuments Men post ready and was almost finished with another World Seed (The Blister is now available for sale!).
But now I’m trying to decide which fiction project to return to, how I want to start bushwhacking—and I’m being pulled in yet another direction by Skip Intro’s Veronica Mars episode for the Copaganda series. Sometimes I watch or listen to interesting analysis (critique and/or appreciation) of stories and find that spark of inspiration. This was one of those times. I don’t know where I’ll take it or what I’ll do with it. Maybe I’ll hunt down more old noir and see if that gives me any new clues.
That’s my ramble for now.
Wait, I should have another review showing up on Geekly Inc soon. I reviewed A Power Unbound, which I enjoyed. I’ll probably have more for you here about that another time, and I’ll let you know when that post has gone live.
Oh, it’s already up! Enjoy.
Inspiration, Irritation, & Spite
There’s a quote from Ursula Vernon that’s stuck with me, something I think I found in one of her Author’s Notes. “Inspiration knocks now and again, but spite bangs on the door all year long.”
That doesn’t ring fully true for me—my spite-writing is usually a rant or half-formed polemic in my journal, and I struggle to turn those into fiction—but it sparked a funny question for myself the other day.
Do I write like oysters make pearls?
Continue readingNimona (Netflix 2023)
I loved the comic by ND Stevenson.
I loved this movie too, right up to the end, even though it was clearly its own take on the story. 90% of this movie, maybe 98% of this movie, did more or less everything I wanted. The actors, animators, and writers did a marvelous job. Then, at the very end, the movie really frustrated me.
I can’t meaningfully talk about this movie, and how I feel about it, without spoiling the end. Suffice to say I didn’t expect this totally predictable ending. I wish they had written a different one. I’ll mark the spoilers below.
Continue readingWriting hope
I’m trying to think of times in my stories when my characters feel hopeful, or when they dream big. I’m struggling.
Continue readingAll Ornamentation Must Be Load Bearing
Given my druthers, I overwrite.
Overwriting is the only way I can get the words out. If I think about what should or shouldn’t be on the page, everything gets gummed up. So when I’m being productive, words pour out and I don’t bother sorting which ones should stay.
I get lots of practice crossing out the wrong words.
Rewriting Bury’em Deep was a big step. I cut it (with wonderful help from Story Boyle) from ~70k down to ~45k and then built back up to ~50k. That showed me what was possible, in much the same way that writing my college thesis reassured me that I could write a large text in the first place.
My World Seeds keep my editing in shape. For those, I regularly crop sections running between 1.5k and 2k down to 750 words. I sometimes worry that I’m losing a little of the magic I want, stripping something special out of my World Seeds in the process. Mostly I feel accomplished.
Plus, if I want to fit my text in my template I need to make those cuts.
All this practice does have some side effects, of course. I now regularly want to strike out chunks of text from the fiction or RPG books I read. I want to strip them down, reshape them, clarify them. I know that I’m enjoying a book when I stop thinking about editing it. I know a book is really good when I feel like every piece of text is doing important work.
That comes back to a phrase I came up with while working with my friend Story: “All ornamentation must be load bearing.” Shit, I guess that’s the title of this post now. The phrase came out mid-crit session, and stuck with me clearly enough that I inked it onto my clipboard. I refresh it every time it fades.
All this cutting and shaping is trickier when editing other people’s work. It takes time to learn their voice—my editing is harmful if I homogenize their style, or replace it with my own. Sometimes pieces are meant to be wordier—but that’s usually period pieces, or something mimicking a specific style. If you want to stay wordy, you need good reasons.
Why am I writing about this now?
Easy: I did it again this week, paring 1.6k down to 860 words in one pass. I’ll cut around 100 words more before I’m finished with that section. I have another chunk, about the same length, that I’m about to start trimming down to roughly 750 words. I’ve got editing on the brain.
The flip side is that it’s difficult for me to switch quickly from editing to writing and back again. I need to separate the activities. With enough of a break, I can do both in the same day. More often, I hyperfixate on one and don’t look up until I’m bleary-eyed and hours have disappeared.
Let’s see if I can get back to editing.
Portals and the hero’s journey
I figured out what I like about isekai and portal fiction—and why some of it feels so bad.
The portal fiction I love most plays with the hero’s journey. It is, at its core, about characters traveling into the unknown and experiencing growth through trials and tribulations. It’s the same pattern that so much adventure fiction I love adheres to.
The hero’s journey puts a big emphasis on coming home to confront the ways one has grown (in the image above, the Act Three segment saying “Master of Two Worlds” & “Incorporation”). But it’s confronting that growth which is the important part; what home you’re coming home to doesn’t particularly matter, as long as the recognition, confrontation, and resolution with past-self happens. The hero could literally return to their home world, or recognize any space within their new world as sufficiently home-like to be their new home—as long as they have that final confrontation and resolution.
And that’s the thought I had when everything clicked.
Continue readingCity of Bones by Martha Wells, and the evolution of character archetypes
I am such a sucker for this art style.
It’s odd, reflecting on the ways in which an author I love has grown (and stayed the same) over the years.
I’m specifically thinking about Martha Wells. I recently read City of Bones, which was originally published in 1995. I’m in the middle of reviewing City of Bones, because it’s being rereleased this year in trade paperback by Tor. I’ll have my review of that up on GeeklyInc in the not-too-distant future.
City of Bones is intrigue, archaeology, lost civilizations and past apocalypses. It’s a thriller, a mystery, it’s got political machinations and murder… you know, the good stuff. What stood out to me though, was…
Continue reading
Fistful of Wits 