Remember when I said I might have good news about Valentine’s Night? Well despite a little tease, the people who were looking at the MS weren’t as into it we thought they were. (Too bad AT&T isn’t into publishing.) Anyway, no one’s comitted to the book yet, so if you’re Read more…
So if you write a lot of SF/Fantasy (or historical fiction for that matter) you know that exposition is one of the heavier burdens your tale must bear. The whole point of speculative fiction is that the universe of the story is not “here”, and the author’s job is to get across what the reader needs to know to understand the story as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Delicate balancing act that, to one end lies opaque confusion and on the other like turgid boredom. The only real advice most beginners get about this is “no infodumps,” which, like the passive voice, will be red-flagged by a lot of first readers offering advice simply because it’s easy to identify.
So how does one provide background detail without being dry and boring? By using details in dramatic scenes. Consider the following :
Yes, the persona known around here as “that stupid pseudonym” is officially put to rest. This past weekend the three novels written by he-who-is-no-longer-to-be-named had their rights revert back to me. This means that Teek, The Omega Game, and Stranger Inside, when they again see print, will probably be under Read more…
Just wrapped up the draft of Heretics, YEA! Something over a hundred thousand words of epic destruction as I continue in my apocalyptic deconstruction of the Hostile Takeover universe. I’ll be doing some fixing up of the draft this week (a few retroconned scenes here, some backfill there, epigrams everywhere) and should get a copy off to DAW by Monday. Doesn’t mean I’m done with it, for good— I always have editorial revisions— but I’ll be done with it for now.
List of stuff that’s happened in my career lately in lieu of a full blog post:
Just got Bantam’s cover art for Lilly’s Song, and it kicks ass (will post as soon as they confirm I can post it to the web). I got an equally kick-ass blurb from George R. R. Martin for it:
S.A. Swann has written a spellbinding fantasy of the Teutonic Knights and the great Northern Crusade, set in a little-known period of history amidst the gloomy forests of Prussia and Lithuania. Vivid and visceral, dark and delicious, this one kept me turning pages from start to finish.
This comes on the heels of the one from Mary Balogh:
Here is a nasty little side-effect of dedicated e-readers that few people, if any have addressed. In addition to any and all deficiencies they might have compared to print, we have a situation in some cases where there’s a single portal through which data flows. Apple has recently given us a glimpse of what could happen if all your media came from one source (be it iTunes, or Amazon, or whatever). Gallycat gives us the story of David Carnoy’s self-published novel Knife Music. Apparently the guy is tech savvy (he’s an editor at C-net) so he want’s to pimp an e-book version. He wants it on the iPhone. He makes it easy by embedding its own reader and putting it up at the Apple App Store.
Watching the publiching industry crumble, we have a glimmer of some good news for those hearty souls that survive the next few years. According to the National Endowment of the Arts, “For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults are reading more literature.” Better yet, it is Read more…
A great post on Elizabeth Bear’s LJ led me, in a roundabout way, to thinking of the difference between the Villain and the Antagonist. She’s talking, generally, of writing characters who are “Other” from the author’s POV. The point being, you write about people, not some collection of external signifiers Read more…
Been doing this writing stuff as a pro for the past sixteen years or so, and I’ve discovered one thing that just never gets any easier. Now it may look like, occasionally, I’m doing several things at once. That’s never really the case, you can’t really write two things simultaneously. Read more…
Via Futurismic, we have a post on The Long Tail blog. The post is a reflection on economies where creating the supply of the goods is its own reward. Take acting, for instance: The thing about acting is that the labor force (actors) actually value the ability to do work Read more…