Which of course has made me raise the bar of expectations as to how many words I can put on the plate when I am officially writing a novel – the old 1000 words 5 times a week is starting to look somewhat shabby. Still… no use thinking about that now, I have months and months before I can be actively writing new words every day again. Though the collaborative novel I am writing with the magnificent Kate will continue on and off over the next month or two I guess… at least I get whole days when I am not actively supposed to be working on it!

So I wrote 40,000 words of weird Shakespeare necromancy novel, to the point where I think I know the plot and the shape of the series, which is exciting, even if the chances are I won’t get to finish it any time soon (at least, if the Nancy series takes off, this one will have to wait, which will be GOOD NEWS).

The holidays are racing fast towards us, and I realised today why it is I try to arrange things so I have hardly any writing work to do in December – school only has a few weeks to go and it’s all assemblies and haircuts and homework and Christmas preparation and extra social engagements and general domesticity taking over, and I totally have to let it do so otherwise my head will explode.

Mind you, my ‘summer holiday’ is also going to consist of critiquing a bunch of manuscripts for ROR, a sekrit editing project, an extra mini-sekrit writing project (just for fun), and you know, I did half think I should be writing some short stories pretty soon. Plus super mighty Tiptree reading. So… there’s that.

Also I have to be prepared for the fact that at some point the part of my brain that I like to call the Gingerbread Zone is about to go ‘ping’ at any moment, and whip me into a frenzy of baking, decorating and menu preparation. Because it does that. One has to allow for these things. If you’re going to occasionally go into berzerker mode where pre-soaking dried fruit in brandy or melting icecream in order to refreeze it in interesting shapes makes ALL THE SENSE IN THE WORLD then you’ve got to plan your schedule around those times when the ginger-nutmeg haze comes down and there are sudden gaps in your memory…

Yep, that’s right, it’s beginning to look a lot like (NO, DON’T SAY IT, NOT ALLOWED TO ACKNOWLEDGE THE COMING SEASON UNTIL IT’S DECEMBER)

Oh, wait.

December is tomoooooorrrrrow!

16316 / 50000 words. 33% done!

So I think I can blog about my current WIP again because I’ve started liking it, which after a week of near-torture is something of a relief!

My main problem at the moment is that I am writing a story set in the Verona of Romeo & Juliet (well, not entirely THAT Verona what with the tropical islands and the necromancy) and the only way to add magic and logic and possibly the occasional steam-powered robot (oops) to Shakespeare is to make sure that the canon itself works hard in the story. And there are only three canon facts about my heroine Rosaline, apart from the whole thing about Romeo being in love with her before Juliet: 1) her complexion was pale 2) she was determinedly chaste and 3) her sister’s name is Livia.

All of these things have given me a massive headache, at one time or another. But if I chuck them out, why bother calling my heroine Rosaline at all? So I’ve had to address them in my story, and in the building of the character. The only problem is that now her sister wants to be a point of view character and she’s a stitch away from becoming joint protagonist, and I can’t, I simply can’t have a protagonist called Livia. Quite apart from the fact that I’ve written three different fictional Livillas in the last two years (OK two of them were historical figures but still) I still live in hope that some day I will write the Great Livia Drusilla novel of all time, and how can I possibly do that if I already have another fictional Livia inside my head?

So I have to screw with canon. Which bugs the hell out of me. Because, you know. I want to be true to the play. Apart from all the liberties I already planned to take.

So she’s going to have to be Olivia, or Livian, or Liliane. Or something.

Damn you, canon!

But this one is newwwwwww and even though I first got the spark about it a year or more ago (possibly two? I think Iz was badgering me to write it for Nano last year) I have not let myself write any of it down.

What I love about new new new new new book is that it’s a challenge in so many interesting ways – it contains stuff I’ve never done before, and a few aspects of it terrify me. But in many ways I think it will make a better follow up to Creature Court than Nancy Napoleon – it’s not the same kind of book in any real sense, but it has a few tonal aspects in common. It can certainly be described as dark fantasy rather than urban fantasy, and I can see it being marketed in the same sort of way.

BUT OMG SO DIFFERENT, HOORAY!

The other nice thing, once I have wrapped my head around the idea that I’m starting a new novel in just over a week, is that I feel like I can start blogging about writing again. There’s something about the middle and second half of a novel where it’s hard to think of anything to talk about – without massively spoilering everyone for a book that isn’t even contracted yet. I mean, do you want to know that Nancy is decapitated in the second last chapter?* No, you do not.

*This doesn’t happen. Unless workshopping it takes the book in a radically different direction…

So I imagine I’ll be talking a lot about writing. This happens when I nano.

Plus, did I mention?

NEW BOOK NEW BOOK NEW BOOK.

If you are Nanoing this year, you can find my profile at tansyrr.

After stocking up on loot from the shop (an activity book and pirate craft project for Raeli, a pirate slinky for Jem, a book about female crewed ships for me) we were taken upstairs to view the sekrit stuff, namely the archive and private library, plus the many staff. I have to say this is the first time I have used writer credentials to get behind the red velvet curtain of anywhere! The girls were well behaved for a good 10-15 minutes as Liz showed me some of their digitised images and shared some gems about the history of the Derwent river. I already have extra Nancy ideas bubbling away, and plan to go back for more visits when not encumbered with two children with a patience time limit (well, the toddler, anyway. Raeli was a jewel the whole time, and charmingly fascinated with the place).

I’m almost at the end of the draft of the first Nancy novel, and while I’m very pleased with the writing and most importantly the scene-by-scene structure, it’s not ready yet. Now that I know which time periods are going to be relevant to the story, I need to do a lot more research on what Hobart was like in those specific times, and figure out for myself what Nancy and Sylvie Napoleon were doing during those specific years.

But there’s the other thing I need to do as well, which sadly no amount of historical books and visits to museums are going to help me with (unless of course they do). I need to find my words.

Language is one of those elements of fantasy worldbuilding that I rarely hear anyone talk about, but it’s hugely important to me. Names have a power to them, and I can’t get started writing until I know what my main characters are called – I’m still dealing with the emotional fallout of having to change a name in Fury, thanks to not realising until one particular scene that I had four characters whose names all began with the letter ‘N’ – but it’s not just the names which help to form the story in my head.

Margo Lanagan once called me the ‘queen of nouns,’ which is one of my favourite quotes ever about my writing. I replied I think that she totally had to become the most famous of all our writing group because she writes the more inspired cover blurbs, and she replied to that by winning a bunch World Fantasy Awards and becoming super famous. What a show off.

But it’s true that when it comes to fantasy, it’s the nouns that pull it all together for me. Words have a power, and I love finding exactly the right ones to convey a world of significance in a single moment. I also look out for this in other works, the use of alien/fantasy words used carefully in context so you understand exactly what they mean, the use of created swear words, and my very favourite, the redefinition of a known word to mean something new and wondrous.

With Mocklore, glimmer and glint took on a very specific meaning, to the point that I can’t read anyone else using the phrase ‘a glint in the eye’ without feeling sympathetic explodey stabbing pains. There are probably others, though those books are a galaxy far far away – I know that I worked to redefine what the word ‘outback’ meant, in Mocklore, in a Delta Void short story, and then there was Daggar with his Profithood and Profitscoundrel ways…

With the Creature Court trilogy, I made a lot of choices to do with words. There were the words that defined my magic system and the otherworld my characters inhabited: animor, courtesi, sentinels, creature court. I don’t remember why I chose to erase the word ‘night’ from that world and replace it with the Latin ‘nox,’ but it worked I think to show the importance of the night, because the absence of the word shone out like a beacon. Also, I find, in fiction generally and in fantasy in particular, there are some words that are used so often they cease to make any resonance or sense. It was pretty clear that ‘night’ was going to be one of those words.

(the catch, of course, was how many times night is used as a compound with other words, which meant I had to decide what to do with nightgowns, midnight and nightmares.)

Likewise, while I love a good Duchess, I wanted my daylight folk to have a language of aristocracy that was almost but not quite familiar. I was throwing around hints of other languages to try to de-Anglicise my work, simply because so many very English terms are used incredibly commonly in fantasy. (not that there’s anything wrong with them as words – but I like to keep myself interested with new things) So Ashiol’s family are all about Duchessas, Ducomtes, Baronilles, and the like.

While ‘princessa’ is a term known to the daylight people, there are no ‘kings.’ King is a term reserved for the nox, and for the Creature Court. One of the choices I made was that, as culturally this was a role only men held, there was no female equivalent. So when Velody defies tradition to reach that rank, she’s not a queen, she’s a damn king. There’s no denying that ‘queen’ and ‘king’ have different weights to them in our culture – why else would the man who marries a queen not be allowed to be named ‘king’ because then he would obviously out rank her? So I thoroughly de-gendered ‘king’ and very much enjoyed doing so.

The other gender choice I made was to write the whole trilogy without using the world ‘girl.’ I do use woman, as there are times when referring to women generally without an age reference is necessary, but the people of Aufleur themselves used ‘dame’ and ‘demoiselle’ as titles and descriptions for women. And maybe there isn’t much difference between saying ‘demoiselle’ (meaning young unmarried woman) and saying ‘girl’ but it felt good, damn it, to erase that particular word and its cultural baggage from three books in the universe.

Thank goodness for search/replace functions, that’s all I can say.

Having been playing in the Aufleur-Tierce-Bazeppe sandpit for so long, jumping back into Nancy’s world was a bit of a shock to the system, not least because I don’t have my words yet. I talked a little while back about not having my magic system nailed down. Mostly what I meant by that is that I don’t have the words yet to convey what magic in that universe is like.

I still don’t. It’s rare for me to be this far along with a book and not have the words – but for once, the story is unfolding first. If I’d got horribly stuck, I would have gone away with a dictionary and thesaurus and nutted the whole thing out, but somehow, so far, I’ve got away with it. It’s a tricky business. I am now a bit more firmly attached to the magic system, and I know there are two kinds of magic in this world – that which humans are allowed to use, and that which comes from the gods. I know it all ties in to the Pandora myth, though I’m not sure how. I want to use ‘curse’ quite liberally, though I also want to be careful not to use it in the same way that, for instance, Holly Black does.

And of course I need to pore over “Siren Beat,” the original novelette, for clues as to how the world works. Sometimes my subconscious is good like that.

The tricky part for me is that while the story is set in modern Tasmania, and is predominantly about magic and magical creatures from European myth, it’s also set in a world in which all the myths, basically, are true, and being slap bang in the particular ocean we are means Asian influences as well, and acknowledging the existence of monsters and magical wonders from as many pantheons and story cycles as possible.

Which makes it hard, of course, to settle on a vocabulary which encompasses all of those influences. [Love and Romanpunk's "Agrippinaverse" was so much easier by comparison, by only using Roman mythology & Greek by way of Roman, I had a vocab ready made for me - Latin all the way, baby!] I copped out on it in Siren Beat with the use of ‘guardian,’ and I’m still a little angry at saddling myself with that, one of the most generic fantasy labels of all time. But then part of me is wanting to use ‘witch,’ too, and that’s even worse. Also, there are enchantresses knocking at the story door, wanting to come in. Damn it all.

As soon as the battle is over and the draft is done, I’m rolling up my sleeves and hunting down every single bloody one of the words I need to make the story AWESOME, rather than merely finished. I will conquer Nancy Napoleon’s vocabulary if it’s the last thing I do.

Then of course, once the magical part is nailed down, I need to use my rusty research skills to find the vocab so that my scenes dipping back into particular historical periods feels real. That’s the good thing about fantasy – having used vocabulary to convey completely made up times and places, I’m well trained in introducing readers to new worlds. Now I have to do it with time periods too, which means actually locating real words, rather than letting my linguistic imagination take over. I’ve been having great fun picking up Victorian Australian slang, and need to do the same with some 1930′s lingo.

The other day, over a conversation on Twitter with Tania Walker about the way Tasmanians (especially older Tasmanians) use the extremely retro ‘cobber’ sometimes instead of ‘mate,’ it occurred to me that this word, which has huge resonance with me because it reminds me of my Poppy, who died when I was ten years old, was perfect for Nancy Napoleon. How better to demonstrate that she’s a tough talking thug who’s been living in the same city for over a century than to have her casually use a term like ‘cobber’ which is traditionally masculine, and belongs very much to another age?

One of my recent purchases was a book of Gothic Australian fiction. I often find that reading fiction that was written in a particular era is a great way to pick up on linguistic gems that the history books simply don’t mention. There’s a reason I went through my Evelyn-Waugh-and-Nancy-Mitford phase back when the Creature Court was unfolding in my head!

Also, possibly, when I’m applying all the exciting new vocabulary to my second draft, I will have to do something about the fact that Nancy Napoleon says ‘fuck’ in every second sentence. But that’s a problem for another day.

If you follow the link, you can see the whole list of winners (twelve previously published writers and eight previously unpublished), and download the winning stories. They will also be available as podcasts at a later date. There’s a write up about the three Tasmanians who won prizes here.

In a moment of rare Being A Writer In Public this evening, I ditched the kids at my honey’s office and zoomed down to the office of the Hobart Mercury, to meet the other Tassie winners, Philomena and Mark, and have some pics taken for (I think) tomorrow’s paper. It was faintly surreal, as I had to negotiate a mostly locked and security sealed building, only to be thrust physically against two complete strangers, and hold each other in a disturbingly intimate embrace for several minutes, before going our separate ways. We feel a little bonded now, like those people who get trapped together during earthquakes and have an emotional connection for the rest of our life.

By the end of it we were all giggling hysterically, as the photographer lined us up at stranger and stranger angles. The funniest part was his bemusement when he asked for the book and we told him there wasn’t one (knew I should have taken some books in!) because it was a short story competition. He racked his brain for about five seconds to consider whether there was some other possible visual representation of a short story competition, then handed us a book about football, which we had to contemplate with great attention.

Only to realise as we finally broke free of our mutual artificial and ever-so-slightly-diagonal embrace to discover that the cover of said book was upside down. Really hope that doesn’t come up in the pictures!

My story, in any case, is called “Taking Leaves,” and as Tehani pointed out on Twitter, it’s totally a speculative fiction story. Literature, schmiterature! You can download it here.

[and just in case you thought I was going to write a whole blog entry without mentioning Doctor Who, this is the story which I was so busy trying to finish before the 5pm contest deadline that I let my six-year-old watch the episode "Doomsday" unsupervised, only to discover with ten minutes left to go before the deadline that she was in ABSOLUTE FLOODS OF TEARS because of the separation between Rose and the Doctor. One of those moments in life where being a good writer entails being a bad mummy. When I discovered I had won the competition, I must admit I felt at least partly relieved that, you know, it was worth it. I probably won't mention to her yet that my current intentions for the money are to fund a solo trip to World Fantasy Convention next year...]

But really I did that thing I always do when I go to the cinema – I sat there, let the images wash over me, and thought about writing. The big screen always does that to me – we spend a fortune on tickets and then I spend half the time plotting & replotting my own stories. My brain is particularly directed towards technique at the moment because of the stage I’m at drafting Fury, and HP7.2 really helped me by reminding me of the one writing technique that Rowling does better than almost any other writer: worldbuilding as plot.

People talk a lot about how crap the HP books are, as if it’s a given that they’re badly written. I’m as guilty of this as everyone else – I get cranky at the occasional rough seam, poking and prodding at it, instead of appreciating how good the overall pattern is. So here’s a positive post about JK’s writing skills!

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – and I’m thinking especially of the book here rather than the films, though a lot of this applies to both) – is packed with magical items, people and settings. It’s a chaotic mass. But there’s very little in it that wasn’t seeded one way or another in previous books. The cleverness of the Harry Potter books is how the worldbuilding is added, one brick at a time, usually wrapped around a piece of plot to keep it in place. So it’s there when, much later, it’s needed again.

It helps of course that a major plot strand of each book is ‘Harry learns magic’ and that the whole thing revolves around a magical school. It helps a lot. It also helps that Harry is an outsider who learns about the magical world in tiny, bite-sized pieces. But neither of these things are accidents. These are both traditional methods for expressing a fantasy world.

The genius of Rowling is in the telling detail. The Snitch Harry catches in his mouth (to show how jammy his luck is, and make us not hate him for being too effortless in how he has picked up Quidditch), the invisible cloak that enables him to get into his various scrapes with his friends over the years, Polyjuice, the unreliability of prophecy, the Pensieve, the Patronus, the ghosts of each House, the goblins and the bank vaults, the rules of duelling … all of these things, which are vital to the final part of the story, were tethered to the world of Harry Potter through their own plot strands, many books ago.

Worldbuilding should never be a shopping list of pretty props, particularly when we’re talking about magic systems. They should also never be revealed to the reader or any character in the book through a lecture – or at least, not only through a theory lesson. If you put a gun on the side table, you have to use it, right? So the best way to explain the magic system or any other important worldbuilding details of your world is to intricately weave them into the plot.

It’s all about me, of course, and Nancy Napoleon. I’m over 50,000 words into a manuscript and I don’t yet have the magic system nailed down. It’s a problem, because this is something I not only need to establish back in the first few chapters, but I need to put it in there as if it could never have been anywhere else. I need to make magic matter that early, even though she’s busy with her drama and grief and guilt and job and all that other stuff. I need to figure it out, damn it. Because apparently I managed to skate over all the details in Siren Beat. I know there are curses, but I can’t have just curses, because Holly Black already did that. I am feeling my way through a sympathetic magic system, using words and objects, but it’s not there yet. I can see places in my story where explaining and displaying how magic works will be perfect, but I don’t yet know what that magic is!

My magical creatures and my romanceish and my backstory and my teenage helper characters and my smutty bits are all tied into the plot and theme of the novel. How did I forget the magic?

Obviously I need to ask ‘what would Rowling do’ a bit more often in my writing process. As long as I’m not writing sex scenes at the time…

It’s quite fitting that I got to spend the day doing writerly things – including going to a local book launch & hanging out afterwards with writing friends Tania Walker, Sarah Brabazon & Elizabeth Carroll. It was exactly what I wanted from going to a random book event like that – one of my current aims is to devote more time and energy to being part of the local writing community, rather than putting all my eggs in the online basket, and this afternoon was a great reminder of the payoff that comes from spending time with writer friends in person.

Ridiculously excited about Nanowrimo this year. Even though it’s a whole book away, it’s zooming towards us at a rate of knots.

5 weeks down, one to go! I’m well in advance of my goal for this six weekly period, averaging 6-7000 words a week, from writing 5 days a week. More importantly, I’ve got the momentum I need to finish my book, and it’s been going really well! I’ve found a weekly (and daily) routine that works for me, the right balance of getting words one, and giving myself thinking time between writing bouts, to sort out the plot and structure of the novel.

I’ve moved the goalposts a little, in the hopes of giving myself an extra kick this week. I might not quite make 40,000 in the six weeks, but I really want to try.

I’m also inspired enough that I am planning my Nano novel already! If I can do 1000 words a day this comfortably, surely I can do the 1700 necessary to produce a writing total of 50K in a month… right? Right?

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If you would like to encourage me over the next six weeks as I retrain myself as a writer and write 30K of my new novel, you can sponsor me at the Clarion Write-a-Thon. No amount too small, all funds raised go towards supporting the Clarion writer’s workshop. I also accept encouraging comments, attagirls and anecdotes about your own times of writerfail and writerwin. It’s the last week! Eeee.

I forgot to do my summary post last week, probably because I was so busy writing! I wrote over 7000 words, which was like a sun coming out from behind a cloud. I am so in love with my novel right now, and the trick is to write as fast as I possibly can while I’m in this mode – lay down the words while I’m feeling the love!

This week I made it over 6000 words. Even then, knowing how well I had done the last fortnight, when it came to forming the above word meter (removing the 20K I started with before the Write-a-thon began) I stared at the maths blankly, not quite able to accept that I was nearly a week ahead of my goal.

Because, hell yes, that’s the key to this kind of challenge. Define your terms, and make the goals achievable. I find that it’s important to give myself a minimum daily word count, and not to allow any extra words to count the next day. In other words, just because I’ve actually written 1250 words a day for the first 4 days, doesn’t mean I get the fifth day off. The only exception I have made for this is when I absolutely know my Sunday (the first day of my working week under this system) is going to be packed, in which case I have written a ‘fake Sunday’ worth of words the Saturday before. I have to do that this weekend, too.

The benefit of not allowing those extra little words to count towards future word count – by saying my goal is 1000 x 5 a week x 6 weeks as well as 30,000 words – is that those little scrappy extra bits add up, and before you know it, I’m ahead of the game. In 4 short weeks, I am 5/6 of the way to my goal for this Write-a-thon, but that doesn’t mean I’m taking a holiday once I hit 30K next week, as I am now certain I will.

So yes, I’m feeling rather pleased with myself right now. I’m liking this current schedule of 1000 words 5 days a week, Sun-Thurs, so much that I am planning to continue it even after the Write-a-thon is done. I’ve also given myself a deadline of finishing the first draft of the novel before Torchwood: Miracle Day ends, which is nine episodes (eight weeks) from now. Discipline, how I have missed you!

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If you would like to encourage me over the next six weeks as I retrain myself as a writer and write 30K of my new novel, you can sponsor me at the Clarion Write-a-Thon. No amount too small, all funds raised go towards supporting the Clarion writer’s workshop. I also accept encouraging comments, attagirls and anecdotes about your own times of writerfail and writerwin.

It’s embarrassing how easily the writing routine has settled comfortably into my brain, and my life. I could have been recovering my discipline months ago. Already my 20,000 manuscript has leapt ahead to be a 30,000 word manuscript and I am very confident that it will, by the end of this six week challenge, be a 50,000 word manuscript.

Not only has the writing been going really well, but the synapses have been firing, and I’m starting to gear up for the book I’m going to start writing in November, once Nancy is done and dusted. How awesome is that?

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If you would like to encourage me over the next six weeks as I retrain myself as a writer and write 30K of my new novel, you can sponsor me at the Clarion Write-a-Thon. No amount too small, all funds raised go towards supporting the Clarion writer’s workshop. I also accept encouraging comments, attagirls and anecdotes about your own times of writerfail and writerwin.