Traveller's Tales

It may finally be time for me to clean up my act a bit.

See, there’s some news.  And the news is, I’m formalizing my relationship with a most excellent literary agent, whose most excellent blog can be found hereabouts.  Of note is that she’s (second edit: now officially!) linked here, so if I don’t start properly cleaning out the cobwebs around here and actually, you know, writing a bit from time to time… well, she knows where I live.  The consequences would be dire.

And so, while I could make lots of very interesting excuses about the amount of time between the prior post and this one, it’s probably easier for everyone if I skip that part entirely and move right to the new stuff, which begins starting immediately.  Schedules will change, habits will shift, and typing will increase, starting… well, today, seeing as how it’s today right now.

First things first:  time to update my blog software to the most recent patch level, and then open up membership — been putting that off from all the membership spam requests, so I’ll do it before I go to bed.

Edit:  Update done.  Wow, the new version is really well put together.  Shame I ignored it til now.  Now if only it would teach those nasty spambots to stop registering themselves…

An interesting discussion on AbsoluteWrite turned into a fascinating bit of self-examination. The discussion was raised by a question: what is ‘too far in advance’ to plan for, when writing? Various and sundry answers rang out, all good ones, and the original poster had six novels planned out. That’s when I chimed in, mumbling about all those years of backstory work I’ve got and saying that six books felt fairly reasonable given my (admittedly focused) perspective.

One fellow then wondered aloud why anyone would want to plan anything like this that far in advance! Fair question, I thought, and without considering it too closely I answered, simply, ‘You say that as though I have a choice!’

Then James A. Ritchie, a fellow whose wit and wisdom I’ve come to enjoy, calls me out, and rightly so: You do have a choice, he asserts. And he’s right, of course. Or at least he is, normally. But I’m just not a normal guy, you know? Maybe I should explain.

I actually don’t have a choice but to write about this place. Rather, I had a choice, and I made it a long time ago. This world of mine is my personal obsession, and my choice was made for me when I decided I had a duty to it: to tell as many of its stories as I can before I dry up and blow away, before the conduit from the world inside my head to the real world is forever extinguished by my passing.

It’s more than a little weird to say that, I know. But my sense of duty is real, my need to share these stories is real, and I can honestly think of worse things to obsess about. Celebrities, for instance. Or where my next fix is coming from. Or peanut butter (hmm, peanut butter is borderline though… down with crunchy! Down I say!). And it’s not as though this obsession of mine runs, or ruins, my life: I have earned success in a professional field, a wonderful wife, great friends, fun pets, time for recreation and fun — all of which make me both happy and content.

I just happen to have a world in my head that I need to tell people about, too.

Now that’s not to say I won’t write anything else in between; there’s a screenplay demanding my attention, there’s some short stories I’d like to tinker with, and possibly some more stuff for game design that will need some dialogue. But none of those are novels. With novels, I don’t have a choice. It’s just something I have to do.

But that’s okay, because it’s who I am.

It’s not a word, actually; ‘synchronicity‘ is, but not ‘asynchronicity.’

According to the link, synchronicity is ‘a coincidence of events that appear to be meaningfully related’ — so I am going to define ‘asynchronicity’ as ‘a jumble of events that appear to have absolutely nothing to do with each other.’

I find writing uses both liberally, both in the narrative and in the development of the story itself. Just like in real life, it often happens that the things you observe (or design) as synchronistic are, in fact, just random events, while asynchronistic events often wind up being very closely tied indeed.

Anyway, the reason I’m interested in asynchronicity right now is because the deep diving I did into Erik’s epiphany has ended up generating some really fascinating repercussions on the deific level of my creation – some fascinating insight into the relations of the Gods themselves, and as a by-product, I’ve unearthed a nasty, conflict-filled (and therefore interesting) reason for something epic and terrible to happen. I can’t tell you what happens, because that would ruin the fun, but I really, really want to. Really.

Instead I’ll ruminate on how it was asynchronistic.

Erik does so many things in these stories, but this was one thing he wasn’t originally intended to screw with at all, let alone like this — I had another scene entirely worked up, at some time much later in the story, using another character entirely (so quite a bit further along, in fact). But this is a fascinating opportunity to forge an earth-shattering kaboom into the tale seamlessly, in a way that’s utterly appropriate, and when stuff like this happens I just can’t force myself to rein in the story. It’s grown on its own, without me, and while ultimately the question of whether I’m the master of this story or simply its reteller is one for another time, the fact is when weird stuff like this happens, you go with it.

It’s not synchronistic, because I made it all up, intentionally — the very definition of an anti-coincidence. I made it up specifically to not be related, and it ended up being related anyway, just not on a level that’s apparent at first.

See, this is one reason I really like writing fiction. It seriously messes with your head. Stuff comes out on paper you never planned, didn’t expect, and that makes you wonder who the hell was at the keys when THAT got written, because it sure as hell wasn’t you. But… hey… err… it’s good… so I’ll just leave it in and assume that whoever did it, won’t mind if I take credit for it.

Anyway; appropriate content for the title I suppose. Sum total: more writing done. Lots more to do, but Lord is looking good.

That’s what they tell writers who want to write to do: write something every day. Doesn’t matter whether it’s trivial, whether you end up using it in your most recent creative opus, or whether it’s ten thousand words in a row direct from your head to the book, so long as you write something.

So what haven’t I been doing lately? That’s right. After my rant about notebooks (below) I started to feel a little guilty. I mean… when’s the last time I actually wrote in a notebook? Honestly I couldn’t even answer that question. I’ve also been unconsciously forcing myself to adopt a linear approach to writing with Lord — going by chapters, start to end, rather than doing what I did with Knight, which was writing the hallmark scenes as they came to me and then realizing how the rest of the story flowed around them.

So it’s time I started actually writing again. And that’s what I did today on the train — I began a new character interview. The character I’m interviewing is Anara, the wife of Paldor — who was murdered a few thousand years ago. She was only vaguely a presence in Knight, and intentionally so, as the specifics of Paldor’s personal life were not yet relevant to the story. They become critical in Lord, however, so knowing Anara is crucial to setting up some of the central scenes to come.

It’s not done yet, but I’m wondering if I should post it here when I’m done with it. It doesn’t give any of Lord’s story away, and it might be of interest to see how the characters develop outside of the story.

Anyway, if anyone would like to see these character interviews… say so and I might just post them. And regardless, I think I’m going to keep up the daily writing gig. I really have to… my wrist is seriously sore from actually writing in that damn notebook! How embarrassing… a writer so out of practice he gets a cramp from writing…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from the novel-writing gig, it’s patience. Things move at their own pace; the world is dynamic and by and large does not revolve around me, much as I’d like it to. As a result, I’ve learned that the stuff that’s really, really important to me will, from time to time, collect some dust, and that there’s often nothing I can do about it.

That sounds defeatist, but it’s not. In fact, it’s freeing; acknowledging and accepting that certain things are beyond your control allows you to take the energy you’d otherwise waste railing against immovable objects and spend it on things you can actually affect. And sure, some things demand impressive amounts of effort in order to advance them forward. But it’s important to learn the difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘out of my hands.’ If it’s #1, fight! But if it’s #2, at some point you’re just going to have to let it go anyway… so let it go and use that extra energy productively.

The sequel, in this case, has been the target of my extra energy. Keeping tradition with Knight, Lord tracks a small core group of characters through the story but regularly pops into the stories of many of the secondary characters. Since a lot of my secondary characters from Knight are… well… no longer available, there’s a bunch of new faces, and one of them in particular has been a tricky one to get to know. If you’ve read the first book, you’ll recognize this tricky new character as Grand Duke Talish Kalegor — you haven’t actually seen him yet, but you’ve felt his presence since the first time you got into Kur D’Shan’s head.

Most of my friends know that when I find a new character I go through an interview process with them — I set up a fairly standard historic bio so I know what they look like, what their voice sounds like and where they came from, and then I write a scene where I’m interviewing them, asking difficult questions of them. Usually I do this until they surprise me — and yes, that’s crazy talk, see the ‘I really am psychotic’ post below — but this guy’s different. He just doesn’t crack. He’s completely self-assured, utterly confident, completely responsible, and thoroughly unflappable. When I hit him with a question that should evoke an emotional response, he stops to gather his composure before answering. When I smack him with a difficult critique he acknowledges the flaw. In short, he’s even better at this than I am, and I wrote the longest interview I ever have searching for a surprise that never came.

And once I realized that this, his ability to beat me at my own game, was the surprise I was looking for, he came together for me, and his first chapter is nearly done. I’m pleased to report that I like him quite a bit, which is good because he’s obviously in an adversarial role and I hate having antagonists that are too easy to hate. Originally I was thinking of someone like William Atherton for this role, but now that I’ve figured him out it’s definitely more of an Ian Holm sort of thing.

Back to the sequel, and as for news about Knight… be patient.

Editing The Grey Knight has taken a lot of time. It’s my first novel, it’s a difficult market to break into, and the story (and its delivery) is nonstandard in enough ways that I’ve had to do a lot of thinking, fast and otherwise, in order to take the core concept and make it marketable. As a result I’ve been largely avoiding its sequel, The Grey Lord, because… well, because I’m an anal structure wonk. The first novel has a definite, specific and deliberate structure to it, and solidifying that structure has been as important (if not more so) than any of the other edits I’ve made to the manuscript. Since I want to echo and expand that structure in its sequel, it makes sense to hold off developing the sequel too much until the first book’s structure is set and I’m happy with it.

Well, as it happens, over the last couple of months I think I’ve come to the point where I can be happy with the first book’s structure, so for the first time in ages I’ve done some non-editorial writing — entirely creative and nonjudgemental. It’s just as satisfying as I remember to see characters take over a scene, and it’s both surprising and rewarding to see some of the secondary characters from Knight stand up to the plate and fill in the empty spaces that the carnage from the end of the first book left open. And now I’m glad I waited; I’m fixing structural issues before they cause any problems, taking the many lessons I’ve learned over the last few years and applying them to Lord as I go instead of via multiple rewrites.

And what’s most pleasing to me is that I like this new story. No, I didn’t expect to hate it. But Knight has been in my head for almost as many years as I’ve been alive, and it was the story I absolutely positively had to tell, and once it was told I wasn’t sure what to expect. I love the characters, and the place, and I care a lot about what happens next, but I wasn’t sure how it would gel, how it might compare against the story I’d been trying for most of my life to tell.

If this is any indication I think Lord may do pretty well at that.

I think most writers probably are, at least the good ones (not that I’m necessarily a good one — I’m fairly certain you can be psychotic and still be a lousy writer. But I digress). A relaxed view of reality is really sort of a necessity when you’re writing fiction, especially fantasy, but I think some authors allow themselves a sort of private belief in their worlds, something maybe not entirely healthy in the traditional sense.

I had a conversation with my friend yesterday at lunch about the novel. She’s been the one championing my book all this time and she knows more about “my world” than most people — she’s been hearing about it at lunch and over email for probably 3 years now. And yet we get into a discussion yesterday about a really obscure part of the history of this place I write about, and I’m getting into all this detail (letting me talk about my world, by the way, is a really bad idea in general), and suddenly she laughs (comfortably, as she’s already familiar with my personal insanities) and says “Chris, you do realize that none of this is real, right?”

Naturally, I laugh back and answer, “Of course I know that, I make it all up!”

And yet I allow a sly wink to the invisible camera when I say that. Lovecraft once proposed that the dreamlands are no less real than the lands we inhabit, suggesting that both experience and imagination share at least equal importance in terms of our growth, our beliefs, even the means by which our brains store those memories. Ultimately, the difference between the two is negligible, undetectable — memory shifts over time, the events of your youth gain the hue of fondness and lose the edges of sorrow or irritation, becoming no more truth than the imaginary friend you once played with or the monster in the closet. Ultimately, if you travel this path far enough, the question of reality becomes a strange one indeed.

Why do I have such a clear channel to this place that doesn’t exist? Why can I tell you what happened to the Kâlindurian King on Thârin in the year 1523 D.R. as the Nightmare Imperium fell? How is it I can recall the story of Queen Da’Saahn’s betrayer, describe in intricate detail the rotting tapestries of scorched EldomÅ“n or the bizarre phased calendar used by the Daloric Empire to predict weather for its farmers?

Naturally, I made it up. Naturally, the place I write about doesn’t really exist; the characters are shades of my imagination, the histories wild flights of fancy. I do not believe they are real, any more than I believe I may find Superman flying through the skies when I look out my window. I’m obviously obsessed with my fictional creation, and I’m pleased that I can turn my obsession into fiction that, hopefully, someone will enjoy.

Then again, maybe it exists, somewhere near where Randolph Carter took his silver key.

Or maybe I’m just psychotic