8 posts tagged “wf-entry”

And sadly that's not the real meaning of the word 'knackered', just the Brit slang of being bloody tired.

Cumulative tiredness of longish shifts during week + 9hr shift yesterday + party last night with alcohol and 4hrs sleep + early 6hr shift today = tired Alex

But, but, there is news!!

STATUES, which I subbed to the Writers of the Future contest back in September, placed in the quarter-finals.  This is what their website has to say about my ranking:

There are 4 levels of placement in the Writing Contest: Winner, Finalist, Semifinalist and Quarterfinalist. Quarterfinalist entries are stories that are of exceptional quality which are in the top 10-15% of all entries for the quarter. It is meant to give special recognition as such.

I turn 20 in 2 days' time!  Yay me again!

Now I have to stay awake for the small family thing (just my aunt and her husband and maybe both of her kids) in half an hour's time.

MERRY CHRISTMAS to you all for tomorrow!!  Wishing sparkle and shiny presents and yummy food for everyone!

I'm stuck on PA again, though I'm not entirely sure why.  I'm getting to some good stuff now - finding out something very important, and then Trifmara's reaction to that.  And, soon, a big battle near Katina which will be followed by the final battle at Krak'vi. 

I think maybe I'm worried it's starting to drag a bit, that I should wrap it up faster, even though the sensible part of my mind says to just write the damn chapters and then go back and make changes.  Blegh.  It's probably just the same "getting towards the end" mental block I get when I approach the end of anything long - happened with my finished piece of mystery crap that will one day be totally reworked, and also with Statues. 

In the meantime, I've been working on short stories:

Statues - Still waiting for a response from Writers of the Future.  I reckon I'll hear from them January-ish, maybe later.  If they don't like it, I'll send it to Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine.

A Shade of Yellow - Still waiting to hear back from Sybil's Garage.  No news is, I hope, good news; a suggestion that they're having to think about what to do with my story.  If they reject it, I'll send to Apex Digest.

Tansu - This is finished and ready for submission, but I'm waiting for Sybil's Garage to respond because if they don't want aSoY then I'll send them this.  If not, I intend to send this to Shimmer.

Snowdrop - A flash fiction of 99 words, submitted to Flash Shot.  Still waiting for a response.

The Beautiful Collection - A fantasy short, just over 1,000 words, that I began in the summer and finished the other day.  I'm not completely happy with it yet, but when it's done I think I'll submit it to Midnight Street first. 

I'm also working on two pirate stories, one for Shimmer and one for Sails and Sorcery.  Both feature my latest muse, D'sil, a mercenary-pirate type.  He's certainly an interesting man to have around.  And my cross-dressing muse will have a short story of his own, but I can't figure out quite how to start it.  

My ambition is to have found a home for all of these stories by the time I submit PA to publishers. 

In the immediate future, November is nearly upon us, which means that Nanowrimo approaches...  I've pretty much decided to write a first draft of Our Green Fairies for this, simply because I feel that if I can get a first draft of it done, no matter how crappy it'll be, at least I'm one step closer to having another finished novel.

I am writing.  Just slowly at the moment. 

Sent Statues off to America today.  All that remains now is waiting for a reply from the people of Writers of the Future, which will probably not come til after Christmas judging by the time it took Rhi to receive her response from them. 
    I think the story is good.  I don't know if it's good enough to win, or come second or third or be an 'honourable mention', but it's good, and I don't think I could have made it any better.  I'm a little nervous about the results, because obviously I'd really like to get a ranking position (something really good to put on my covering letter when I submit Painted Angels, not to mention the awesome factor of my story doing well); I'm also happy I finished it.  The story wanted to be told, so it wasn't a waste of time, and if it fails in this contest it won't be resigned to the gutter.  Esh is already bugging me to write the next part of the story from her viewpoint.  I can conceive of a grand story as a collection of shorter things about the length of Statues, with Statues being the first, and all progressing along the story line to an eventual ending.  Don't know what will happen after Esh's story, but I'll figure it out as I go along. 
    It was also a good diversion from that bloody meetings chapter in PA - speaking of which, maybe I've finally got it sorted.  *crosses fingers*  I played around with it this afternoon, dividing it back into two chapters and adding more of people's expressions and body language as per Rhi's suggestion to make the atmosphere of the meetings more tangible... and maybe, just maybe, it's worked.  I'll see what I think when I reread it. 

I've finished my contest entry piece, but Illan's story is definitely not over. 
    Statues charts the story of her discovering the truth about her world.  Right now she's going to do something about what she's learnt, and then she'll come back and tell me what happened.  *grins*  In the meantime her lover, Esh, has started knocking gently on the inside of my head, suggesting that I tell the next part of the story from her viewpoint.  I even know where it would begin - with Esh giving Illan's mum the birthday present Illan can't give because she's not in Haven - but I don't yet know much more than that, other than it would also feature Jer, a minor character from Statues.  He's determined to let me know that he's not a bad guy, which his brief appearance in Statues suggested. 
    *sighs*
    Gotta love these muses. 
    I knew a while ago that Statues would spawn a much larger piece, and keeping it in check to fit the contest's word count was tough at times.  But without a deadline on anything else I write with these characters, I can proceed at a leisurely pace.  Crucially, I can shift my focus back to the recently-neglected Painted Angels and the wonderful Meetings chapter that still doesn't work! Argh!
    Still, I am pleased to get this piece done.  Now I've got about two weeks to polish it up before sending it over to America for judgement. 

Last night I was working on my contest entry, and I was trying to come up with a word for how Illan jumps/slides/gets into the aircar while some people are trying to shoot her.  I wanted a word that implied the hurried jerkiness of the motion, so 'slide' was definitely out, and 'get' wasn't nearly descriptive enough, while 'jump' implied too much of an upwards motion.  So I went through to the kitchen to bounce word ideas off my parents; they do crosswords and read a lot so they have pretty damn good vocabularies.  Anyway, while throwing myself around the kitchen trying to demonstrate the action I wanted, I realise 'throwing' - or, rather, 'threw' - was the word I wanted, to which my dad piped up, "No, no, you need something smoother, like 'slide', because everything in scifi is smooth."
    (Head, meet desk.)
    (Ow.)
    As someone who doesn't read scifi, and whose recent contact with the genre has probably been shiny TV adverts that use a 'scifi' setting to show how such-and-such product is the product of the future, I suppose I can forgive him. 
    I've never understood how a massive jump in technology would make everything shiny, clean, pristine, even, or aesthetically 'perfect', or however you want to describe it.  The jump from caves to where we are today certainly didn't produce such an effect, and I don't think technology ever will.  Sure, you might get certain areas in certain cities/space stations that have this shiny, metal-and-glass appearance, but it will never be universal.  Humans are dirty, gritty creatures and we would never lose that.  That's why I liked Star Wars, because no matter how wonderful Naboo looked you could go to some dodgy bar and find Han Solo hanging around.  (Mmm, forgive me while I drool...)  Sure, that comparison isn't perfect because a massive war and societal collapse happened between scenes on Naboo and scenes with the sexy Han, but dodgy bars nonetheless existed on Tatooine before the war.  Heck, Tatooine itself was a dirty, gritty place. 
    Most of my scifi leans far closer to the gritty side.  In my contest entry, a high-tech society collapsed, leaving only a small scavenger community to pick through the ruins.  Their technology is reasonably low, often using plants along with more traditional building materials - their city, Haven, is constructed from stone and the metaga plant, which is manipulated with song.  In Painted Angels, Carrenei City is very shiny, made of metal and glass in the upper, central levels - though the city never actually appears 'on stage' in the story, it is compared by both Fox and Falnec to the planet Nhkotai's dusty cities.  Mey is definitely gritty, with lower tech, and the various other settings are like that too. 
    Why not write everything with high tech?  Well, because it would probably get boring.  "OOoh look, another shiny city. Mmm. Wow."  I like varieties and ranges of tech, preferably suitable to the location if the story is set off-world and/or in extreme climate conditions.  For instance, the scavenger people in my contest entry are in a desert, so they use weapons with sand as ammunition - certainly no danger of running out!  In the story after Painted Angels, there's a water world where glass and other building materials are made from shells (obviously some shells there are pretty sturdy!).  In Kevin J Anderson's Saga, the people of Theron live in giant, dried-out fungal thingies because their world is covered in vast trees, while the Roamers live in all manner of ingenious asteroid/moon/planetary settings. 
    In conclusion: Scifi doesn't need to be like a shiny car advert.  The more imagination used in devising scifi settings, the better. 

The Etched City

K.J. Bishop

A darkly fantastical story, The Etched City is a prime example of the wonders the fantasy genre can yield when the writer isn't afraid to do something new.
    I was drawn by the cover and by an except on the back: "Have you seen a split cranium, growing flowers like a window box? I saw that, a mere hour ago."  Also, I admit, after the publisher Tor gave me the wonderful The Carpet Makers I wanted to see what else they've been publishing lately.  
    I wasn't disappointed.  Though at the beginning I had no idea where the plot was leading, or even what the plot was, by the end I'd been drawn completely and utterly into the weird and wonderful world depicted within these pages.  
    It begins with Raule, in the desert.  She bumps into an old associate, Gwynn, and together they flee the desert and their enemies to the city of Ashamoil.  There things get weird.  Gywnn, you realise, is the main character, though Raule's story continues to be told in the sidelines and intertwines with Gwynn's at times. A gunslinger currently employed as the henchman of a slave trader, Gwynn is surprised to find himself depicted in an etching.  He becomes determined to track down the artist and, with the aid of a delightfully trippy scene where he gets high, he finds her.  While he becomes closer to the strange artist Beth, his 'career' runs into trouble.  It is with Beth, though, that the weirdness happens.  It's hard to describe.  Think of warped, chimeran dreams brushing against reality, and you're close to the focus of this book.  
    My only complaint is that it took a while to get started.  Nonetheless, I thoroughly enjoyed the beginning.  KJ Bishop's worldbuilding and characterisation is brilliant, staying far, far away from the medieval-fantasy-crap clichés.  Raule and Gwynn - and the Rev, Beth, and the other characters - are all interesting, three-dimensional people, happily populating the fuzzy grounds of grey.  
    In reviews on amazon I've seen her work compared to China Miéville's; it's a fair comparison, but she has her own style.  For one, she doesn't give massive infodumps.  While Ashamoil is very much a tangible place, it's not nearly as thoroughly described as New Crobuzon, perhaps for the better.  If asked whether I preferred this or Perdido Street Station, I think I'd lean slightly towards this, but I wouldn't blame anyone for sliding the other way.  It's a touch choice.  
    A resounding 5 / 5.

KJ Bishop Linkspam:
    Check out her website, where you can find links to extracts from Chapter 1 and Chapter 7.  While I don't think they're the best bits to take extracts from - Chapter 7 is one of the best but the really good bit hasn't been included in the extract - hopefully they'll give an indication of her style.
    I found this interview with her particularly interesting, as it helps explain why Raule starts off as the viewpoint character, only to leave it all to Gwynn once they reach Ashamoil.
    Another good interview.
    Link to her flash fiction, Silk and Pearls.  It's fantasy, and kind of fable-like, and though the first few paragraphs are background infodumping it gets very good, with a wonderfully dark ending.
    Link to her short story, The Art of Dying.  Much to my delight, it features Gwynn, providing a window of sorts into his life after The Etched City.  If you read this and like it, you'll love her novel. 

Finished Book 5 of the Saga two days ago.  It was absolutely awesome, especially the big battle at the end (why can't I write space battles like that?), but now I want to read Book 6.  Because, naturally, he's left two massive cliffhangers at the end.  Though it looks like the major foe is finally defeated, two more threats have popped up - one of them not all that surprising, really, and the other pretty much out of the blue.  And I want to know how things turn out for some people, and I particularly want to see what mental thing Basil does next.  But as Book 6 is currently being written, I expect it'll be sometime next year before we see it in print.  *wills Kevin J Anderson to write faster*

As if desiring to distract me from the Saga's cliffhangers, manga has arrived in the post! Godchild vol 2 by Kaori Yuki and Saiyuki Reload vol 4 by Kazuya Minekura.  I've already read Godchild vol 2, and it rocked muchly.  Kaori Yuki's artwork is absolutely stunning, so beautiful and fluid, and the story continues to be suitable bizarre.  It's about Cain, a young earl in Victorian England, who lives with his half-sister Mary Weather and manservant Riff, and collects poisons.  Death seems to follow him wherever he goes, brought on by his not-so-dead father.  It's told in a series of short stories, but with the thread of his father running through it. 

I started reading xxxHolic vol 1 (by Clamp) today, which has been sitting on my shelf for a while.  I picked up vol 3 a while back, because the cover art drew my eye in Forbidden Planet, and it was pretty good.  It's about a high school kid who sees ghosts and spirits, and finds himself drawn to the time-space witch Yuko's house.  There, he finds himself bought into her service; once he's worked long enough, he gets his wish to not see spirits.  And by 'service', I mean cleaning stuff and cooking, and occasionally helping out with her work, not anything dodgy.  I don't really go in for smutty manga, mostly because the artwork is pretty grotesque (over-huge boobs and penises has never really appealed to me; it just looks painful ^.^ )  Mmm, I love my manga. *hugs manga*

More good news: I finally got my butt in gear and sorted out Chapter 11 of Painted Angels, the first chapter of the Peace-Keeping Meetings arc.  I cut a scene, went through some lethal surgery with my OTT descriptions, and tacked on what had previously been the next chapter, also cutting out a brief scene that was fun to write but *totally* irrelevant to the story.  I found myself chuckling a few times at some of Trifmara's thoughts, particularly when she comments on her lack of cleavage, which I guess is a good thing - means the character is really jumping off the page.  Sent the chapter off to Rhi to beta, along with Chapter 4 of her story speckled with my CC.  I totally didn't figure that the title of her book, 'Dancing in Circles', actually had something to do with horses dancing.  I thought maybe people, but not horses. So that was a cool surprise, and it looks like things are set to get even more interesting. 

I'm currently about 9,500 words into my contest entry, but I didn't feel like working on it today.  I need to figure out exactly how the next action scene will unfold, and it wasn't flowing into my head today.  Maybe tomorrow.  I think I get off work at 3pm, so I should be able to get some writing done.  Either my contest entry or PA.  My other muses are being remarkably co-operative about letting me focus on those two, which is pretty decent of them.  As I might be writing Our Green Fairies for Nanowrimo this year (my word-count estimate for the first draft is in the region of 50k, and I was always planning to write a crappy first draft before perfecting it, which makes it good Nano-fodder), the general muse for that story is laying low.  The characters aren't muses, so much as the general idea is a muse.  It's odd, but it seems to work.  My latest muse, the cross-dressing one, has been damn quiet.  Every now and then he floats vague ideas towards me, but there's been no prodding yet. *pets co-operative muses*

Got Chapter 7 of Painted Angels, the space battle one, back from my beta.  As I said in earlier posts, I'd been having a fair bit of trouble with this one; no matter how many times I read it and tried to think of how to make it better, it just didn't feel good enough.  Well, she's given me LOADS of CC for it (mostly to do with the bit before the space battle rather than the battle itself, which was a bit of a surprise), so I'm happy.  Hopefully now it won't make publishers go "eww".

Edited up Chapter 10 the other day, though I didn't really need to do much - mostly reading it through and tightening it up a bit, and tweaking things my FP reviewers pointed out.  I'm sure Rhi will find plenty to comment on, but it usually takes a fresh pair of eyes for that next level of editing-work. 

I got stuck on Chapter 11, though.  It's the first Peace-Keeping Meetings chapter and it's really shit.  There were two scenes originally and I'm cutting one of them; the remaining one needs serious trimming.  Basically, there are about four or five paragraphs where I describe each character one after the other.  Boring and un-necessary.  I need to describe Ben and Wil, as they're main characters, but I need to do it in a less 'and here's my descriptive paragraph on so-and-so' way; the other guys in the room need no description, if I'm going to be completely honest with myself.  Also I need to find a way to make Ben sound less like a piece of jewellry: he currently has golden skin and hair and emerald green eyes.  In the opening paragraph, he's looking out over a sapphire ocean.  It's like going to see the crown jewels without leaving your sofa!

As all this axing would leave me with about 1,000 words of chapter (and almost half of that is an Archive excerpt about the planet Naiad), I'll be tacking it onto the next chapter.  Might try to do that tomorrow, or at least sometime this week, but in the meantime...

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Spent a couple hours today working on my entry for the Writers of the Future contest.  It runs every quarter (of the year) and the entry must be no longer than 17,000 words.  The deadline for this quarter is 30th September and I'm almost halfway through the first draft.  I wrote a fair bit while I was on holiday and finished typing that up yesterday, so today was all new stuff.  Not much to say other than it's going well and the action's starting to heat up a bit. 

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Posted up a request on __fantasynovel (an LJ community), asking if people in the community know of any good books or websites where I can research Faerie folklore and medicinal/magical uses of herbs for my planned low-fantasy novel Our Green Fairies.  So far I've been told to check out my bookstore and library (which I shall do) and I've been recommended a novel, which I might check out (but I might not, as there seems to be a quest and a strong troo lurve element, and the person who rec'd it said the plot was kinda crap even though the Faerie element was good).  I'm currently reading Neil Gaiman's Stardust, partly because it is about Faerie and also because Gaiman rocks. 

Thing is, I kinda want to have the Fearie stuff to be similar to what LKH used in her Merry Gentry series.  What ho, I hear you say? (pun intended)  There was plot and worldbuilding in there?  Well, yeah, but you have to look reeealllly hard and I can't be arsed.  I'd ask LKH herself what books she used to research, except (a) she probably used a calendar, and (b) she'd probably accuse me of copying her even though the folklore's not exactly hers.  This is the kind of thing this author does (and I'm really not joking about calendar-research. She also admits to researching sex scenes with her hubby. TMI!!!)  *sigh*  Oh well, maybe someone will rec me good books and I can be lazy, or maybe I'll just have to hunt the info myself. 

I think I may post on fpdebate (another LJ community...I've started collecting them) asking for the clichés of yaoi / shounen ai because Our Green Fairies will also feature a m/m relationship.  I want to avoid the usual pitfalls.  The story's set in 1901 Paris and the romance element is going to be a kind of mix between Lolita and absinthe.  The guys in question are aged 37 and 16 - Luc, the 37-yr-old, is an alcoholic whose poison of choice is absinthe; he uses it to seduce Dantie, the 16-yr-old - no troo lurve here, folks, just the beautifully twisted variety.  (I'm actually reading Lolita on-and-off as research for how an older person seduces a younger person, owing to my lack of personal experience.)  There are other plot-lines besides the romance - the other main one involves Faerie and magic-with-herbs (rather than magic of the fireball variety). 

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So I really should be cramming the QRG and reading for my dissertation, but I wanted a writing day.  Which will probably turn into a writing weekend if I'm not careful.  Really do need to put in some QRG time tomorrow, though, especially since my boyfriend told me there's other stuff I have to know too.  Argghhhhh!!!!