Briefly Noted

My review of Guy Gavriel Kay's new book, Under Heaven, is in today's Montreal Gazette, and up at the Gazette's web site.

Apparently, I'm In A Book

So I wanted to check if an article I wrote for a web site ten years ago was still online. The piece was a profile of Vancouver rock band 54-40, for The Rough Guide to Rock. Which was a sort of early crowd-sourced site, as I recall; fans were encouraged to write in about their favourite bands, with the possibility that accepted articles might see print if the site ever published a book version (there might have been a ten dollar payment or some such involved; at this point, I can't remember). The site doesn't seem to be around, but I guess the book did get published. And I do seem to be on the list of contributors, though Google Books won't let me preview the 54-40 entry.

On another note, I find I've also been cited as a source in Wikipedia for an article I wrote previewing the last Worldcon. Which is surreal in a way I can't quite define.

Readings, and other things

Well, that was an annoying delay.

I broke my modem a bit before Christmas, and only now am I back online. It says something odd about society, perhaps, that being able to access the internet is so very important, but (it seems) the only way to get a modem easily is through your ISP.

Anyway, the time off-line may have been useful. I completed the novel I was working on; it's a very rough draft, but is overall complete. It's 106 000 words, and I wrapped it up on Christmas Day a bit after 1 PM. Now I have to put in some heavy time revising it.

Between Christmas and Boxing Day, I added 12 books to the apartment. I read 10 through December, one of them from the library. So that's a total of 113 books read on the year, with absolutely no change in the number of unread books in the apartment overall. I still intend to write about the books I've read, so have added a general-purpose 'readings' tag. I think the exercise of keeping track of my reading was a good one, so I'll continue that for the future, and see how it goes.

Catching Up

In the end, I made my 50,000 words for November, and the novel's actually progressing nicely. I want to keep going at a high rate, finish it, then research and rewrite it. It feels good, and I'm hoping I might be on to something with this one. Working title: A Treatise on Opticks.

I did buy (or was given as an early Christmas gift) Liquid Story Binder. I'm looking forward to bringing over other things I've been working on, and trying them out in this program. Opticks has benefited from LSB's architecture, but I have an idea some of my other long-term projects might make an even better fit.

I read one book in November, which was also a book I added to the apartment. So no change overall in the reading stats.

Finally, a significant document, courtesy of the Robot 6 blog: The series bible for Batman: The Animated Series. Some interesting notes in there, including character backstory that never made it into the show (Renee Montoya was married?). For its soundtrack and design sense alone, that show was one of the greatest achievements of American TV. Check out the link, and see that sensibility as it was first laid out.

Binding stories

For the last couple of years, I've taken part in National Novel Writing Month. I signed up again this year, and decided I'd try something a little different. In addition to generating 50,000 words of text over the course of November, I'd change up my habits a little, using some new writing software. Specifically, I decided to give Liquid Story Binder a try instead of trusty WordPerfect.

LSB isn't a standard-issue word processor; it's really a variety of things, allowing you to enter text in a range of formats to help you outline and organise a long multi-part work. There are text editors that you use to write "chapters" as well as "notes"; you can also create "dossiers" and "outlines", which format information in ways that might be useful as you work on the structure of your story, as well as "journals" which link info to specific days, and "mindmaps" which create a kind of virtual pin-board on which you can move brief notes around to help you get a visual sense of how ideas link up. You can use the program to set up a playlist of mp3s, or establish a gallery of images related to your story. And so on.

The program does so much, in fact, that it can be difficult to get your head around. It's possible to look at all these features and wonder what it all has to do with actual writing. Certainly I found it difficult at first re-imagining my working process to take advantage of LSB's features, but over the past couple of weeks I've come to find the program really helpful; I suspect the novel I'm working on has gained a level of complexity it might not have had otherwise. Or, more precisely, I've reached that level of complexity with a certain ease that I might not have got with a word processor.

A word processor is by its nature linear; you're basically entering text on the screen as though the screen were a sheet of paper. Liquid Story Binder takes more advantage of the properties of a computer. On one level, that means that you can change the colour scheme of the program to match the tone of your work. More profoundly, though, it makes it easy to have multiple applications -- or sub-applications, in this case -- open at once. So you can work on a chapter, have three notes open while you do, and have an outline next to the chapter which tells you where the chapter fits in to the overall framework. And you can have a visual reference in the background to help you along. The program seems designed for the current generation of rectangular monitors, taking advantage of all that horizontal space to have multiple stuff going on at once.

Crucially, having these multiple formats and multiple windows seems to make it easier for me to visualise what I'm doing. It's easier for me to make connections between parts of the book. It's easier for me to see how it builds, how the parts interrelate to the whole, and I what have in mind for each of those parts as individual pieces.

Now, up this point, I've actually just been working on the story's outline. Which is a bit of an issue in terms of NaNoWriMo, in that I now have to write 50,000 words over the next dozen days or so. We'll see how Liquid Story Binder does with that; I haven't yet tried out its actual text-entry aspect yet. That's where word processors shine, obviously, and we'll see if LSB can match the ease and flexibility of WordStar. That said, I like what it does so far, and like the way it helps me think about structuring fictions. I'm going to seriously consider buying the program when the free demo expires.

Slow recovery

Anticipation ended ... what, three days ago now? ... and I’m beginning to feel like I’m getting back to normal. It was a blast. Most of my thoughts on it can be seen at the Narratives blog on the Gazette’s web site (specifically, at this link), but I’ll throw out a few notes here as a last look back.

First off, given what I’ve been writing about on this blog, I should note that between free stuff, review copies, and things picked up in the dealers’ room and elsewhere, I ended up adding more than half-a-dozen unread books to the apartment:

Crossing the Boundaries: French Fantasy from Bragelonne

Science Fiction: The Best of the Year 2006, edited by Rich Horton

The Magicians, by Lev Grossman

Sang du pierre, by Élisabeth Vonarburg (I’m hoping to lay hands on the English version, Blood From a Stone, soon; published at the same time, and sharing a title in translation, the French and English versions have different stories)

Objects of Worship, by Claude Lalumière

Magic Mirrors, by John Bellairs

Curse of the Wise Woman, by Lord Dunsany

... and then wandering around yesterday I bought The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance, so what the hell, let’s throw that in there too. Eight, then, nine if I get the other Vonarburg title.

Second, it was a lot of fun meeting people. And interviewing people; attending as a member of the press allowed me a useful perspective, and of course led to interviews with fine people like George R.R. Martin, Lev Grossman, and Felix Gilman.

Third, and related to the above, it was a powerful sensation being at an event of that scale dedicated, at its core, to writing. Sure, there were a lot of other elements to it — media, filk, gaming, and so on — but most of the programming had written work as its focus. I learned a lot, but even more, the sheer volume of writers, and of discussion of writing, seemed for me to reach a kind of critical mass. I don’t mean that it was inspirational, or even that it was a reaffirmation of the value of imagination and storytelling, though in fact it was both these things; what I mean is that it suggested to me, or reminded me, that writing and literature and language and dreams can be made a way of life. Or more precisely, a way of being in the world. Which is to say: a way of survival.

So there’s some value in that. Grace and I are looking at going to Con-cept, a local convention, in early October. We’ll see.

Article up

A quick note to say that my Gazette article about Neil Gaiman is now up.

Grace Notes

I've been far too slow in posting this, but: Issue 12 of the Beneath Ceaseless Skies literary fantasy webzine is up. I recommend the magazine highly, especially this issue, which features a story by Grace Seybold. It's really good. You can also find more of Grace's work in the new issue of Neo-Opsis. Excellent work, I feel.

Fiction Update

My short story, "Kreisler's Automata", is in issue 10 of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, a webzine dedicated to literary fantasy. I'm quite pleased, and very appreciative of the sensitive editing job I received. Check it out here.