The · Nine · Winds

A PSA, mainly for angikate and melissajm (and akaspeedo and windowscreen, too *g*):




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David Drake's tribute.

A remembrance from Bob Stacy.

From the Baen Website:

Toni Weisskopf and Dave [Drake] suggest that people who wish to make a memorial donation purchase copies of THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN and donate them to libraries or teenagers of their acquaintance.

Remembrances of Jim's life will be held at Trinoc*Con in Raleigh, NC Saturday, July 22 and Lacon IV, the Worldcon, in Los Angeles, CA in August.

The Proxy Circle message board finally caught the eye of some spammers. At first we just had a lot of unregistered users posting ordinary spam advertisements; giving moderator privileges to the board's core of loyal denizens has kept that beautifully under control (I say with much appreciation to those already much appreciated folks). Then we started getting what appear to be bots signing up for multiple registrations in order to list Websites in their user profiles. I tweaked the software to prevent them from entering URLs, but there's no way to prevent them from registering (I can't institute verification, because email through the board is disabled). So I manually delete about fifty of these registrations every couple of days.

The good thing is that they're easy to spot, because the usernames have strange-looking and recognizable characteristics. (MimreInihex, EckpisBrabra, HehexHomim...There's a new one now, in the other browser tab: TitiTira. They've rediscovered the T's!) Even better, sometimes their sort-of-like-a-name generator comes up with intriguing entries. Some of which, with a bit of shuffling, could make quite nice character names, with the benefit of having a different flavor from names that my own brain would generate. (I've used name generators to make up big pools of available character names, but only after establishing what qualities make the names from various regions identifiable, and inputting the syllabic components. I came up with the components to begin with, so the results sound like names I would make up--which, along with saving me time in doing just that with pad and pencil, is the point.)

If nothing else, it makes it a lot more fun to go on fake-registration patrol; it becomes trolling for character names instead.

Jura Lipus, Kuho Tollio, Jobra Mimpul, Opily Heju...I've got a loose confederation of monstrous mutants in the works, and names like these could be just the thing. Thanks, bots!

I've got some extra Triad material in hand: deleted scenes and backmatter that there wasn't room for in the finished book. I've uploaded an updated glossary of terms and a comprehensive list of characters to the Website.

...I'll be on Jim Freund's radio show "Hour of the Wolf" on December 3rd (broadcast on WBAI from 5-7am).

Also, doing a NYRSF reading on December 6th.

My mom relayed the cutest thing the other morning:

She'd woken later than usual, from a dream of being in Eiden Myr having wonderful adventures. At the very end of the dream, she'd been trying to find someone who could tell her if Eiden Myr had closed-captioning.

I wonder whether it was a yes or no answer that woke her up?

One of the most surprising things a friend ever said upon reading one of my novels was "I figured out which character in your book is me!"

Is that a tendency people have? To look for portrayals of themselves in a work of fiction by someone they know, the way you'd look for mentions of yourself in a friend's or acquaintance's memoir? It would never occur to me to do that, so it strikes me as very odd. If it turned out that there was actually some fictional character modeled on me (highly unlikely), I don't think I'd even recognize it, the way you don't recognize your own voice on a recording.

( mercy cut )

I would hope that everybody finds the character in one of my books who's them, or somebody they know; and if they don't, that's totally fine, and in that case I'd hope that some of the characters become their friends and become part of them. That's part of what the truth of fiction is. Every one of my books is me--a microcosmic me, a fractal me, a refracted me, a holographic me, a schizophrenic me, a chewed-up-cud me--but every one of them is as much, or more, the reader. So maybe that friend did find the character who was her.

Advance readers' copies of Triad have arrived.

It looks like a book now, and it feels like a book. There are other "Look, I wrote a book!" moments--when the manuscript is printed out in its mountainous ream-of-paper glory, when the page proofs come in all professionally typeset--but with the arrival of the ARC the drafty world of loose, one-sided 8 1/2 x 11 becomes the firm reality of bound, double-sided trim size. The production phase moves tangibly into the publication phase. I can catch a glimpse of my significant other tucking an ARC into his beach bag and get a little jolt of Hey, look, that's my book! There's a quiet but abiding delight in it.

I find myself falling into the book again at every stage. I hope that bodes well; I hope it means that the book is fallintoable, that it rewards rereading, that one opens it to leaf idly through and finds oneself reimmersed. At an editing-your-own-work panel at the last I-Con, someone asked whether it's a chore rereading your own work, and my answer was yes in that by the time you're proofreading the paperback galleys you never ever want to see these same words in this same order again, and no in that I genuinely enjoy rereading my own stuff. I tried to defuse the comment with some lame disclaimer about possible narcissism, and despite the gentle laugh it got I'm sorry now that I did, because in truth it's not an egotistical or self-congratulatory kind of rereading. It's loving and happy and appreciative of the book for what it is, not where it came from or who gets credit. It's a bloody good book, and I just think that's really cool. When I fall back into the book--its virtual reality, or an appreciation of its language--I'm proud of the book, not of myself. It's bound and trimmed now. It's got a separate identity. It is almost wholly itself, discrete and independent.

And one of it is sitting on the shelf now, and I smile every time I see it.

While I was away on vacation earlier this month I read two whole novels. They were Chuck Palahniuk's Lullaby and John Crowley's The Translator. In between I read Michael Moore's Stupid White Men as a palate cleanser.

Since I've been back? Nothin'.

It's still a mystery, but less disturbing now that I know I'm capable of staying immersed and taking as much pleasure as ever from doing so.

The page proofs for Triad have the oddest typographical errors in them. As a connoisseur of oddity, I find them appealing, but I'm also puzzled. So is the proofreader. The book was set from disk. The only explanation the proofreader could offer was that accidental keystrokes now and then deleted or garbled text, and the text then had to be rekeyed from the manuscript, since cutting-and-pasting from the electronic file could have wreaked formatting havoc.

A great many--"was" becoming "wags," "the" becoming "fee," "ever" becoming "even," "more" becoming "mote"--seem like OCR errors. Some--"long-waisted body" becoming "long-waisted bod," the name Lornhollow becoming "Lornhollowi"--seem to be keying errors and are kind of cute. Some--the end-of-sentence period being dropped in many instances when a three-point ellipsis follows, and an extra point being added to three-point ellipses when the sentence trails off without ending--seem like some kind of global-replace errors. Some--the hyphen being dropped from "re-formed" (meaning "form again"), and capitalized proper nouns becoming lowercased--seem like little random moments of demented copyediting. (I reviewed the copyedited manuscript and I know the copyeditor. He didn't do it.) A few--"So much moaning and groaning" becoming "Some much moaning and groaning," "A dream" becoming "A dreams"--are more puzzling, almost like closed-captioner's errors.

But a whole bunch are quite confounding. How did commas turn into periods, and periods into commas, before closing quotation marks? How did capitals creep into the middle of sentences, striking conjunctions and prepositions at will? How did plain old end-of-sentence periods wind up being commas?

"Your village," Rekke said, through split lips, "It's--"

"Asrik ran," Ioli looked straight at Louarn.

"You can't scare me." she said. "I've been trying not to scare you."

(It occurs to me that that last bit would have been a better choice for my Meet the Prose Party sticker at Readercon; I could have made it, technically, one sentence by using a semicolon. Ah, well. What I get for throwing a dart.)

Weirdest of all: In many instances, the word "I" after an ellipsis was dropped. How does that happen? Is the letter "I" part of the formatting code? Is the software suffering from an ego crisis?

Is a puzzlement.

I haven't been able to finish reading a novel since I finished the last one I wrote. Short fiction aplenty, but no novels.

I've also read somewhere in the vicinity of fifty novels since I finished the last one I wrote, because I copyedit books for a living. But that's a different kind of reading, started and stopped owing to different exigencies, laid aside when a different sort of fatigue sets in; and although I engage on a readerly level with the books I copyedit, I finish them because it's my job. I'm fortunate to get assigned a fair number of books I would buy to read for pleasure, but there's no telling whether I'd have been able to finish them if I'd come to them that way.

This is weirding me out. It's not just that I blew my brains out writing my last book, and it's not just some kind of attention-deficit disorder; it's more like a kind of impermeability. I'm usually more porous than this. I'm usually a novel sponge. But I put down, half read, the last three books I picked up. They were good books. I just couldn't sustain my engagement.

I should be spongy. I want to be spongy. I'm not spongy.

Possibly my long-fiction processor is overworked and needs a res(e)t. Possibly I'm overconscious of what I should be reading and should be writing and can't give myself permission to relax and enjoy long-term immersion in the pure pleasure of unassigned narrative. Possibly I need to venture outside my established literary zones; they're pretty wide, but circumscribed relative to the variety of what's out there. Possibly I'm just in a nonfiction and short-fiction place right now, and I shouldn't get torqued about this.

But...it's weirding me out.

When am I inspired to scribble five legal-pad pages of notes (and diagrams and arrows and exclamation points and triumphant oversize asterisks) that look a great deal like my mad-scientist great-grandfather's notes on his theory of cosmology? Notes that have me shaking with an actual adrenaline rush, because they're so freaking cool and they might be the Key to Everything? Notes that make me want to shoot myself in the head for not taking better care of my mad-scientist great-grandfather's notes because they might in fact be minable in a potentially wondrous instance of cross-generational cross-genre cross-pollination?

When one of my big annual freelance projects is shipping from the publisher and has moved my other freelance deadlines up a week and my five minutes to uncross my eyes by spewing out an LJ post are now up and if I don't get back to work I'll be in a world of pain when I don't get to go to bed tonight.

Feh.