queenlua

Judith is suspicious of the new Riegan heir.

~9.5k words.

Here at AO3.

( spoiler-filled notes!Collapse )

Modern AU. Half a year after graduating from Harvard, Lorenz returns to campus for a bit of a reunion—and runs into the last classmate he’d expect.

aka, Lorenz and Claude get third & fourth wheeled together & it’s all very awkward

~8k words.

Here at AO3.

( sorta maybe spoiler-y author's notes under the cutCollapse )

splitting this into fiction vs nonfiction this month, since uh, historically my nonfiction reviews tend to run long. expect the nonfiction books sometime this weekend.

Crazy Weather by Charles L. McNichols

Why have I never heard of this book before?! THIS BOOK WAS AMAZING.

I picked it up on a recommendation from Ursula K. Le Guin—she wrote the foreward for this edition, for an imprint of books which tries to highlight rare, out-of-print-and lost books. (The idea that Crazy Weather was ever out-of-print stuns me.) And her foreward is a better pitch than I can give, but I’ll try to go for a tl;dr version anyway.

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Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

So somehow I got this far in life without reading Slaughterhouse-Five, and honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect. My knowledge of Vonnegut was pretty limited—on the one hand, I knew he’d written some truly beautiful letters. On the other hand, "Harrison Bergeron" sure is pretty cringe to a modern reader.

Well, I’m pleased to say Slaughterhouse-Five holds up quite well—though it’s definitely more of an experience than a story.

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Duplicity by N. K. Traver

Quick YA thriller-ish book; picked it up because of a (very vague and distant and one-sided) connection to the author. The problem with being a Full-Time Professional Hacker is that you’re, uh, very picky when it comes to fictional depictions of hacking (even if said depiction is obviously meant to be a little supernatural), and I will tactfully hold further comments :P

West by Carys Davies

Honestly, the NYT review summarizes my feelings better than I could, so just take a gander at that.

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There are a hundred lessons the queen wants to teach her son before he leaves her.

Pre-game, Almyra. ~3k words.

(aka I wrote some self-indulgent pregame fic with Claude and his mom, come join the ride)

Here at AO3.

( spoiler-y author's notesCollapse )

did you know that, in Switzerland, there's a legal requirement that all housing includes a large enough bomb shelter for everybody?!

it's one of those Cold War relics that is, for whatever reason, still on the books, and apparently still followed.

(no idea whether the fallout shelters are... actually that robust... against nuclear fallout... but yeah)

this amusing fact came up while i was talkin' w/ some peeps about how a lot of Hong Kong's coronavirus response has been driven by "SARS was extremely terrifying for us specifically, so fuck that noise, next time some mystery respiratory bullshit happens we will be prepared," which sure is panning out better investment-wise so far than these lil' nuclear bomb shelters, as charming as they are

lately, i've been trying to be a little more systematic with how i approach my writing.

not in terms of writing schedule, or wordcount goals (though there is a bit of that), more like—i'm keeping a little log of the problems/decisions/tradeoffs i encounter while i'm writing any particular piece, and i'm trying to figure out how i make those decisions, if i can make those decisions faster, etc.

because—look, i'm a slow writer in general, but if i'm in a groove, 1k/day isn't too hard to hit. if i could hit that groove consistently i'd be golden. the problem i often run into, though, is that i'll have a piece mostly done, but then i'll spend like, damn near a week rewriting the same transition over and over because nothing's quite working, and i'll try fiddling with every damn lever available to me (do i need to switch PoV here? does this one scene need to be three scenes instead, and if so, how does that change the overall flow of my narrative? can i word this in a way with the desired conciseness that's still clear? etc), and so on. and i usually find a solution eventually (or, give up, throw hands, and push out something suboptimal), but then two months later i've forgotten all the shit i tried to make that work, and how i decided on the thing i did, because my brain's a damn sieve. and i'm hoping if i record that process, i'll be able to internalize it better, and converge on a solution faster, when i run into similar problems in the future?

in a way this feels not-unlike when i was learning mathematical theory—i was playing catch-up in college on that front, trying to figure out how proofs even worked, and of course the kids who'd been doing this stuff for years couldn't really explain their process. "idk, i looked at it and it felt like an inductive approach would work, so i just did that" i managed to catch up to them only when i started thinking of math in terms of tools—you've got a bunch of math widgets and theorems and axioms lying around, can you use any of them in some fun way for this problem?—and i'd just grind through trying shit out until something stuck. and that works! eventually you internalize some things!

so, hopefully being explicit about my thought process will help me figure out why sometimes the words come fast and why sometimes it's a slog. we'll see!

* * *
at some point i got annoyed at Writing Advice Books, because so many of them focus on more basic elements of craft, or writing prompts for "inspiration", or religious adherence to some Fixed Way Stories Much Work—but maybe there's some book that addresses this sort of thing? stuff like "if you're having an issue introducing a character [x] given [y] complicated situation, here's some stuff to try that you may not have thought about?"

maybe what would be helpful is something like that "writing as a craft q&a" that Ursula Le Guin ran online for a while. (maybe i should pick y'all's brains more...!*)

* i've also toyed with the idea of posting some of the stuff from my "writing decisions" log, but i somewhat suspect that'd only be of academic interest and/or only of interest to me, so

or maybe i'll discover something entirely new about "when the words come easily" vs "when words are horrible"; i'm reminded of this old bit from Virginia Woolf:

"Style is a very simple matter: it is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words. But on the other hand here am I sitting after half the morning, crammed with ideas, and visions, and so on, and can’t dislodge them, for lack of the right rhythm. Now this is very profound, what rhythm is, and goes far deeper than words. A sight, an emotion, creates this wave in the mind, long before it makes words to fit it; and in writing (such is my present belief) one has to recapture this, and set this working (which has nothing apparently to do with words) and then, as it breaks and tumbles in the mind, it makes words to fit it. But no doubt I shall think differently next year."

anyway yeah that's what's up in writingtown lately, thoughts welcome

if you've got anything ranging from a passing interesting in tech news, to, y'know, deep in the thick of it all day errday—you should probably be reading Normcore Tech.

it's a newsletter written by an east-coast data scientist, about "issues in tech that I’m not seeing covered in the media or blogs and want to read about." it turns out i also want to read about them!

for instance, here's a piece on the creator of Nginx getting arrested last month. while the mainstream news sites covering this story got the main points correct, what those stories lacked was the context/backstory that this author provides, which is just dang interesting in-and-of-itself (how Sysoev got his start is super-fun!), but also helped answer some of the questions i had: "woah wtf? is this just some Russian oligarch being comically evil again? did something happen? how is this related to the acquisition by an American company?" etc, etc.

(if you're a techie, the importance of Nginx is self-evident, and if not, that's chill; she explains that too.)

her bit on the deceptiveness of big tech companies' claims of AI prowess is another example of her solid writing approach. while companies misstating/exaggerating claims is hardly news or surprising, her doggedness in clearly "following the money" and explicating why this specific claim, and why now is quite useful.

that concludes my Official Recommendation TM

Hilda meets Claude’s parents. They’re not who she suspects.

Postgame, Verdant Wind. ~12k words.

Here at AO3.

idk if people really do "making-of" or fun notes on fics anymore? but i'm doing it today, because, fuck it whatever, and i'm feeling self-indulgent

under the cut because spoilers

( lalala fic-writing is funCollapse )

from an old interview, emphasis mine:

Luc Reid: Back around 2002-2003, you won the Phobos contest (may it rest in peace) and were a published finalist in the venerable Writers of the Future contest. Then things were pretty quiet until 2011, at which point your fiction, in the words of Aliette de Bodard, "was basically everywhere." What happened in the years between, and what so powerfully motivated you to pour new effort into your writing career?

Ken Liu: Briefly: I went to law school, started a new job, and kind of gave up on writing for a while due to a supreme act of stupidity. I wrote this one story that I really loved, but no one would buy it. Instead of writing more stories and subbing them, as those wiser than I was would have told me, I obsessively revised it and sent it back out, over and over, until I eventually gave up, concluding that I was never going to be published again.

And then, in 2009, Sumana Harihareswara and Leonard Richardson bought that story, "Single-Bit Error," for their anthology, Thoughtcrime Experiments (http://thoughtcrime.crummy.com/2009/). The premise of the anthology was, in the editors' words, "to find mind-breakingly good science fiction/fantasy stories that other editors had rejected, and release them into the commons for readers to enjoy."

I can't tell you how much that sale meant to me. The fact that someone liked that story after years of rejections made me realize that I just had to find the one editor, the one reader who got my story, and it was enough. Instead of trying to divine what some mythical ur-editor or "the market" wanted, I felt free, after that experience, to just try to tell stories that I wanted to see told and not worry so much about selling or not selling. I got back into writing—and amazingly, my stories began to sell.

(h/t sumana's blog. "There is no ur-editor. It's us.")