Sylvia Volk's Journal

8:45pm: The world's funny.

My agent's just emailed me from Australia (see, it's a big world we live in) with bad news; two editors have turned down my book City And Dragon. Both said they loved the book and their house staff also loved it, and one added that it'd get great reviews and probably win awards, but still, no.

My agent's furious. Man, I'm beginning to like the guy - I barely know him as yet, but I like it that he's angry. At them, I mean; not at me. My subconscious probably expected him to throw me out.

I've written Awards, Eventually on a scrap of paper and taped it onto my laptop. Then I can look at it every day while I work on the next book.

8:44pm: I'm amazed by the idea of this. It's a book trailer, but framed as a video and put up on YouTube:

11:33pm:

This is just interesting; this video about Circassia was made with quotes from a book I'd scanned and put up on my nonfiction webpage. The internet! Everything links up to such a myriad of other things, and this is a prime example.

9:47pm: Well, how wonderful.

3Deep chapter six, Dead Ends, is up on the public end of the Ford, my home away from home and general nest of tv-obsessed genii. At last! Seems like we've been working on this one for, oh, since dinosaurs ruled the earth, but now it's done, and it's awesome.

10:09pm: There's a writing contest link here.

Big thanks to Bo for pointing me toward it!

There's also good news: a new episode of 3Deep is coming your way, world! And it's got spiders, street cred, and issues of grey.

8:15pm: Bred to a harder thing
Than triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Where on mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known,
That is most difficult.

—William Butler Yeats

10:05am:

Haiku2 for sylviavolk2000
character yearn for something and then a juicy obstacle or two
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10:03am:

Blog-Word! for sylviavolk2000
like
Your word buddies: dr_schreaber@livejournal.com crystal_one@livejournal.com whitestripes4vr@livejournal.com ewtikins@livejournal.com professoryaffle@livejournal.com
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Created by Grahame

11:03pm: By Alden Nowlan, again, another
Beginning

From that they found most lovely, most abhorred,
my parents made me: I was born like sound
stroked from the fiddle to become the ward
of tunes played on the bear-trap and the hound.

Not one, but seven entrances they gave
each to the other, and he laid her down
the way the sun comes out. Oh, they were brave.
and then like looters in a burning town.

Their mouths left bruises, starting with the kiss
and ending with the proverb, where they stayed;
never in making was there brighter bliss,
followed by darker shame. Thus I was made.

11:01pm: By Alden Nowlan, quoted with love (but not permission, see)
For Nicholas of All the Russias

Wind in a rocky country and the harvest
meagre, the sparrows eaten, all the cattle
gone with the ragged troopers, winter coming,
mother will starve for love of you and wrapping
newest and least accustomed leave him squalling
out in the hills beside the skulls of foxes,
it cold and snow in the air. Stranger, knocking,
(now in this latter time even the poor
have bread and sleep on straw) what silly rumour
tells me your eyes are yellow and your lips
once rose trout-quick to suck a she-wolf's teats?

Our Lord, his peaked heir and hawk-faced daughters
are gone, although they say one severed finger
was found after the soldiers cleaned the cellar.

3:07pm:

Frozen Grand Central Station, because I a) visited New York two months ago, and spent some time playing tourist in that very place, and b) saw Cloverfield today, featuring more known New York scenery being pounded to dust by a monster! And strafed by missiles! While parasites attacked! Really, there's no downside to a movie like that.

10:07pm: Oh, wow.

11:12pm: Motto for the week
Disce, doce, dilige inimicos!

9:12pm: Yep, I was plagiarized for about 6 hours ...
... and that's all! Talk about speedy reactions. Thanks to marbleglove and others (waves to you all!) the stolen story was removed the same day that it went up.

Further, thanks to the fandom_lounge community, Alexaviera's ff-net stories were all poked at, and probably to nobody's surprise, large chunks of several others seemed plagiarized. She was reported, and yelled at, and by yesterday evening, more stories had vanished entirely. Only five now remain. I've checked them on general principles, and the internal evidence (ie, a distinctive pattern of errors) suggests they were all written by the same hand.

Dorothy, thanks for your help.

Alexaviera, by the way, also possesses a webpage under the name of Lindsey McDonald, featuring one of her ff.net-posted stories. More than that I do not know. Maybe it's not a surprise that she hasn't answered my email?

4:19pm: Well. A very kind person named marbleglove has just written to tell me that some yoyo named Alexaviera J. Raven's swiped my Highlander story The Good Student, arguably the best-known story I've got online, and available through my webpage for the last ten years. The story's just been posted on fanfiction.net, as Alexaviera's own work. Cute. Alexaviera also seems to go by the Angel: the Series pseudonym Lindsey McDonald, and I've written him/her and asked for the story to be removed.

10:54pm: Everyone must read Italo Calvino
I'm short on disposable cash at the moment, and I know a couple of places in my home town where I can get books for little or nothing - the local small bookstore where I've got a credit balance 'cause I recycle books I've bought and don't like, and the local small library which has a pay-what-you-want shelf for discards. Today I had time on my hands, so I went trolling round these sources--I could also have tried out the recycle center, which has a bookroom, but I didn't need to, because, bonanza. A whole stack of interesting books!

An assortment of topics, too. Someone on my flist posted a books-I-have-read list for 2007, and hers were all genre ... mine's not. Anyway, here's what I got:

Essentials of Marketing, third edition. I dunno what's inside this, except that it's got chapters on copywriting and selling, which is a subset of the set named [writing skills], so I want to skim through it and see what it's about.

Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities. I love her Cities and the Wealth of Nations, and in fact Jacobs is one of the three best writers of rhetoric in my experience - the other two are Hannah Arendt and Robert A. Heinlein - so naturally when I saw this, I grabbed it. A must-read. I dunno why I haven't seen it before, except that her books aren't widely popular in western Canada. Maybe I read it a long time ago and forgot it.

Tanith Lee, Dark Dance. On general principles. Lee seems to be largely written out of ideas, gone into YA and doing pirate books, but she may have come up with something different of late. So on general principles, a must-read.

Canoecraft, by Ted Moores and Merilyn Mohr. I may want to know how to build a canoe from scratch someday ...

Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs, and Steel. This one's been on my find-it-and-read-it list for a couple of years, and lo, the heavens rejoice, for it is in my hands, no payment down. I like the large-theory-of-civilization genre of nonfiction, because it's full of the trivia of history. And just plain fun to read.

Active Voice, third edition, An Anthology of Canadian, American and Commonwealth Prose. Which I dunno what's inside it, like the Essentials of Marketing book, but I'm bound to learn something if I read it!

Fogswamp, by Turner & McVeigh. About living with wild swans. The living-in-picturesque-places-close-to-the-wild genre. Usually fun, and full of descriptions of things I'll never see myself, which makes it worthwhile. I may want to write about swans someday, ergo a book about swans. I've already got books about beavers, and bees, and goats - on the same rationale.

Chilton, The Wealthy Barber. About investment strategies. Because I'm reading every book within reach on that subject, this year, and it's a classic of the genre. I want to become a better money manager. I know where I can lay hands on a copy of The Wealthiest Man in Babylon, later! I'll get to that one too.

Gerhards, How to Sell What You Make - which is about marketing crafts and artwork, specifically. I dunno. I've got a friend who'll like it, after I've read through it ...

Also I ordered a copy of Murray's Simple Wealth, Inevitable Wealth from Amazon, and checked out a book from the library: Warren Mackenzie, The Unbiased Advisor. They're both about investment strategy. I read about half of The Unbiased Advisor before supper, and it seems informative.

Also, what I've been reading, I mean during the past week? Jim Butcher, Cursor's Furies, fantasy. Edward de Bono, De Bono's Thinking Course, about how human beings think. Lance Armstrong, It's Not About the Bike, biography. The Mammoth Book of Sword and Honor, an anthology of adventure stories. Italo Calvino, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, which is just amazing! - about tarot and the nature of storytelling. Everyone should read Calvino. Everyone.

Umm ... three more books on investing, none of which were much good, although one was thought-provoking in the area of mathematical gambling systems and the art of maximizing returns when the deck is stacked for losses, ie. stock-market investing. (I'd never try that stunt myself, because I know nothing about it, but the system involved was presented in an interesting manner, all but identical to the system taught by a book on how-to-play-professional-blackjack that I found a couple of months ago.)

Also, Sybil Marshall's Fenland Chronicle, which is memoir about the English fenlands during the first half of the last century. And a bunch of articles from Outside magazine, narrative adventure.

... That's all. Look, though, I didn't read all these books one after the other, because I'm a browser, I flit between things. There's a stack of fantasy also waiting on my dresser, but right now I'm on a nonfiction jag at home, reading fiction mostly during my breaks at work, and going through the investment-strategy genre within reach as fast as I get my hands on them. My hands are full of treasure, and it's all books!

And look, everyone must read Italo Calvino, seriously.

10:17am: Everyone should read here
Look!

Here's a library of short stories, mostly classic horror and fantasy. It's got a whole book by Lord Dunsany, and Chambers' The King in Yellow, which last is among the all-time bests in atmospheric horror stories ...

5:04pm: Wow, it's Ali in action!
Go here and read Alicia Rasley and her fellow editor Teresa's new blog! Go early, go often! Everyone who cares about writing ought to be signing up for feed from this blog, and by the way, I think I was lucky enough to read an early version of Alicia's new book Point of View, and it's excellent. And that's because Alicia Rasley is amazing.

10:58pm: The Secret Life of Swashbucklers
Okay. After stewing over chapter one for, lo, these five days straight, I have 3500 words and still no action scene. So I'm hitting my projected 5000-word goal right on the head so far, which gives me happiness. The next question is what would be the Ultimate Coolness in an action scene with swords, and luckily I know what that is, but I have to get it down on paper before I'm finished the chapter.

8:37am: Oh, and you can find the Le Menagier de Paris chapter from this linked page, http://www.thousandeggs.com/cookbooks.html which is a listing of historical cookbooks on the net. Check under French cookbooks. It's right near the top.

8:30am: Go to http://www.foodtimeline.org/index.html and take a look. This site is about the history of foods - basic ingredients, basic recipes, period recipes, ethnic recipes, and how different dishes evolved through history. Just reading it is fun, and I've already saved a bunch of pages - I mean, The Menagier of Paris' chapter on recipes in English translation? Come on. What isn't to like about that??

That of course would be more useful when writing historical fiction than spec fic, but what matters when writing fantasy is getting a background that rings true, and this can help, because it starts with the basic materials - meats, grains, ice, breads - and gives a broad range of what can be made from them. With neat recipe names and ideas: steaks stuffed with oysters, for one. That was new to me, and I like the name. Carpetbagger steak. I can easily see coming up with the like for a scene. So if you know what types of crops and animals your farmers are raising, you can build a plausible cuisine.

What's more, the site includes links to all sorts of related reference material - BBC articles on Viking daily life, online medieval cookbooks, whatever - and it invites (and more importantly, answers) questions.

11:00pm: The Secret Life of Swashbucklers
Another eight hundred words. Cool. The first fight scene is coming up fast.

9:37pm: The Secret Life of Swashbucklers
Chapter one, eight hundred words. It's a start.

8:40am: Jane Epsenson, meet Terry Pratchett
Jane Epsenson, the admirable, writes about how to create a character viewers instantly love:

http://www.janeespenson.com/archives/00000470.php

Her suggestion is to make the character yearn for something, and then she says But also give them a nice juicy obstacle to getting it. A technique to make the audience love even an otherwise shallow character; the original question in her mind is about beauty contestants. We only see them for a brief time and in the shallowest of circumstances; why do we end up rooting for Miss Idaho, for instance, over Miss Michigan? That's interesting. Ms. Epsenson goes on to say that something else that always works is giving a character unrequited love; do that, and your audience instantly and instinctively roots for them.

Ms. Espenson is a TV writer, of course, so she writes something very different from books; a TV script's a sprint, compared to a book. Even a short book. A book's, like, a marathon. (That's not my thought. It's John Garner's.)

But. You could use her make-them-yearn gambit, especially with the unrequited love, to hook a reader's attention into a character. Use it as a hook? And then plot in the But also give them a nice juicy obstacle to getting it. Combine that with good, solid, deep character construction, and you might end up with something very good indeed.

In fact it sounds a lot like the effects Terry Pratchett gets with his Discworld characters. Granted, many of those are shallow: they work as background color. (I still prize his riff on Conina the Barbarian Girl, invincible in battle, who yearned desperately to become a hairdresser.) And he also tends to write at least one major quirky/colorful quality per character. (Which is probably very important.) But he usually starts them off with a quest - see above - and then a juicy obstacle or two. By the end of the book, they'll have won their goal, whatever it is.

Then he either deepens them and keeps writing about them, or else shuffles them to bit-player status and uses them as shallow background color.

Hm, he never plays the unrequited-love card. He's against it, or else it doesn't fit in with what he wants to do with his stories.

Hey! He's got a pattern for his continuing characters:

Book one: Character has a couple of interesting quirks + a quest. Obstacles rise, the character surmounts them by book's end, happy ending. (At this point, either relegate character to background color, or keep him in protagonist's role.)

Book two: Character (if still in protagonist's role) is happy - until something hits him out of left field and turns his life upside-down. He spends the book dealing with this, whatever it is, and wins through. Happy ending.

Book three, four, five: lather, rinse, repeat.

I like that. I like kewl patterns like that.

12:53am: I'm a Carrot!

Which Discworld Character are you like (with pics) created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Carrot Ironfounderson You are Captain Carrot Ironfounderson of the City Watch in the greatest city on the Disc – Ankh-Morprok! A truly good natured, honest guy, who knows everyone, and is liked by all. Technically a dwarf, but only by adoption. You’d rather not be reminded that you are the true heir to the throne, but that does explain why people naturally follow your orders… Carrot Ironfounderson 75% Commander Samuel Vimes 50% The Librarian 50% Death 38% Gytha (Nanny) Ogg 31% Greebo 31% Lord Havelock Vetinari 13% Cohen The Barbarian 13% Rincewind 13% Esmerelda (Granny) Weatherwax 0%