Author: rachelhartman

Merry updates

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* I finished a plot outline for the sequel to Seraphina on Wednesday, and am feeling quite jolly about it. It was only the fourth attempt, which isn’t bad (for me). I sent it to El Señor Don Gato Editor, who appeared to rather like it, which means there will be lots of revisions.

* Yes, there would also have been lots of revisions if he hadn’t liked it, except that they wouldn’t be “revisions” so much as “Could you please start over and come up with an actual plot this time? What? I said please!”

* Revisions are good. Revisions mean there’s something there worth revising. As the folk saying goes: “Thou canst put no shyne uponst a cow pye.”

* It is so a folk saying. Go ask anyone. “Uponst” is a regional dialectic variation, accepted by fauxlorists all over the world.

* I am pleased to inform you that it looks like plotting is a skill one can learn, given enough time and enough banging of head upon table. I’ve done the experiment so you don’t have to. You’re welcome.

* That’s “plotting of books,” not “plotting to make mischief.” I have a natural talent for the latter. The former, well. It’s just a good thing I’m stubborn.

* Yes, the silliness of my blog posts does increase proportionally with how merry I am. You may graph it if you wish.

Edited to add: Ooh! We are getting close to a finalized cover at last! It just needs to go through one more round of approval next week, I believe. I hope this one gets the thumbs up, because I really like it.

Across a crowded room (full of books)

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Here’s an interesting post by Cory Doctorow on marketing, or as he puts it, “getting people to care about the products of your imagination”. The article’s focus ends up being on self-publishing, but I think it’s relevant for any author, really.

What interested me most (because I approach everything obliquely for some reason) was the first few paragraphs where he described his early bookselling career. I’ve been a bookseller, too, and he’s got his finger on something I often used to feel: the pathos of publishing, that books (even good ones) are ephemeral. So many shine briefly and then disappear.

Long ago, I worked in an antiquarian bookstore in Chicago, where I eventually became a buyer. People would bring in old books and I would offer them money — or not. Age alone does not make a book valuable: someone also has to want it, and most of the books that have ever been published are long forgotten (often justly, but sometimes not). That was an unusual store in that it was tactically disorganized, forcing patrons to browse. I think young Doctorow, based on his description of himself, would have loved it. It was for exactly that kind of reader, in search of a serendipitous book, and that is the kind of context where books – obscure books, books that have disappeared undeservedly – are united with readers who will appreciate them. That was a beautiful thing, to my mind.

Later, I worked at Children’s Book World, where we prided ourselves on being able to unite books with readers in a different way. We all read extensively, we got to know our customers, and we played matchmaker. It was very, very satisfying.

Doctorow seems hopeful that the internet and electronic media will keep books available longer, but there’s still that crucial step, connecting reader with text. Sites like Goodreads help bridge the gap; book review blogs do too. I like to pretend to myself that I’m doing something useful in that direction right here. But I think readers are also an important part of the equation, readers who actively look for a book that will speak to them, regardless of how difficult it may be to find.

What’s the most serendipitous book you ever found, and how did you find it? Or – if you will permit me to pose the question spookily – how did it find you?

On art

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A friend recently mentioned my “Epic Fail” post on a Metafilter comment thread. I’ve been checking back periodically to see whether the arguments are still going or if they’ve died down. I am intrigued to note that the discussion seems to have veered away from feminism and toward art (well, some of it has. The part I find most interesting).

I really like talking about art. I am tempted to make myself a Metafilter account and leap right in, but I don’t have the time and besides, if I want to spread my crackpot ideas around the  internets, I have my very own space right here.

I think about art a lot because art is what I do. Honestly, the only reason I write (as opposed to sing) is because I have some native ability there. If I could dance or cook or paint or build gigantic bizarre installations at anything like the same skill level, I might be doing that instead. I’m not fussed about the medium; I just want to get out there and art it up.

I sometimes think art should be a verb: the impulse to art, the tendency to art, quick get me a bucket I’m gonna ART…

I don’t like definitions of art (the noun) because people  insist upon quibbling about the borderlines – X is art, Y is not – and I find that tedious (also, I get silly and end up talking about toilets, and who needs that?). Art has no borders that can’t be redrawn. Some artists spend their entire careers just stretching those borders. That’s what they find exciting, and more power to them. That’s not a question that moves me, particularly.

Here’s what does move me: subjective experience. That’s what I look for in art. The artist is a lens held up to the face of the world, showing everything from an unaccustomed angle, revealing what is hidden, making the old look new. Art (to me) is a burning need to share the subjective, to say, “Here’s what I’ve seen, what I’ve felt and thought and tasted, loved and wondered and fought. This is what it was to be me.”

That may sound like egotism, and I admit it’s a fine line. But egotism says, “Look at me!” whereas art, I believe, says, “Look through me, because the world is fascinating (or other adjective of choice) and I want to show it to you.”

The things we often take for art – virtuosity and technical skill – I would call craft. Good craft can make the lens less obvious (and poor craft can do quite the opposite), but it’s always there, and you can always see it if you know how to look. Sometimes you have to deduce its dimensions from the negative spaces around it. Me, I like seeing the lens. I tend to think the lens is the entire point, rather than what is shown on the other side.

My favourite authors tend to be the ones I recognize as kindred minds, as my people – Terry Pratchett, Lois McMaster Bujold, George Eliot. I read their work and see a person who has suffered what I’ve suffered, loved where I’ve loved, been through the same fires and come out the other side. But they are not me. They come to different conclusions, try different solutions, broaden my conceptions of what’s possible, and give me a new angle on my own challenges. They don’t have answers; they have experiences.

And this, I think, is what art is for. It’s a signpost on the road, saying, “Humans have been here before. It’s a rough road ahead, but you do not walk it alone.”

Fall in love with the future!

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Go check out The Intergalactic Academy, where my writer friends Phoebe and Sean have just started blogging about YA science fiction. The future’s looking better already!

The Heroine’s Journey

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On Tuesday I was talking with a friend of mine who is a doula and a writer, among other things (I’m linking to her, because you never know! One of you might need a doula). She has recently been training to teach Birthing From Within classes.

At this point you’re probably saying to yourself, “Did I click the wrong link and end up at someone’s baby blog? What does childbirth preparation have to do with writing?” Read and learn, darlings!

There are lots of different kinds of birthing classes, with varying philosophies behind them. The philosophy behind this one (or the part my friend thought would interest me) is that giving birth is a kind of Hero’s Journey, as surely as Frodo going to the Crack of Doom, and that an understanding of its stages would be tremendously helpful to mothers-to-be.

You’ve heard of the Hero’s Journey (or monomyth), surely. Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces laid it out clearly, though the idea goes back to Jung and the idea of archetypes. It became very popular when Bill Moyers did a documentary about Campbell, revealing that he was good friends with George Lucas, who had deliberately structured Star Wars as a hero story. The “men’s movement” of the 90s – which was all about men getting in touch with their feelings and learning to forgive their fathers via drum circles (or some such) – was also rooted in Campbell’s ideas.

In other words, I knew about it, but it was all very masculine to my mind. Hearing my friend describe childbirth in those terms was… well, it was surprising and exactly RIGHT. You are called to perform this task that is surely to big for you to handle. There is no turning back. You undergo an ordeal (and must surrender to it, or it hurts even more). There are times you really think you might die – or that death would be a wondrous relief. You come back with a great gift. The ordinary world looks completely different to you afterwards.

And you can’t stop telling your story. Ye gods, I remember that. I could not shut up about it: the great flood, the wild broncos bucking, my husband an island in the stormy sea. I was desperate to hear other women’s stories. We were like veterans. Nobody could understand (or wanted to hear the gory details) but us.

I’m working on the plot outline for my second book. You don’t have to scratch the internet very hard to find a dozen sites with the Hero’s Journey laid out tidily for authors (esp. screenwriters). Just plug in your ideas, and presto! You’ve got an instantly compelling story!

It was interesting to read the steps of the journey, certainly, and a little relief to see that I  had already instinctively created some things that corresponded.  And I’m sure it’s possible to make a story that way, from the prototype up, but it  could end up being The Phantom Menace as easily as Star Wars. The steps are not for my story, but for myself.

Because this, too, came clear in talking to my friend: the journey is compelling as a story because it’s a journey we all take. Being a writer is not so different from giving birth, after all. What’s interesting is not how my written work conforms (or doesn’t) to some preexisting template, but how I am learning to walk the path myself, to be the hero of my own life. I went through an ordeal indeed with Seraphina; I’m still on the Return part of that journey, but already called to begin another. How do I do this? How am I changed? What have I learned?

I’m trying to plan, of course, with this plot outline, but there are unanticipated monsters ahead, and unanticipated help. And in the end, there is nothing for it but to set my feet upon the path and go.

Tiny updates

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* Still no cover yet. Don’t fret: you’ll be the first to know, once it’s official and I’m allowed to shove the artwork in everyone’s face, crying, “Look! Looooook!” So really, enjoy the quiet while you’ve still got it.

* I started reading Enchanted Glass yesterday, Diana Wynne Jones’s last novel (unless there’s something posthumous up the sleeve of her estate)(ooh, the Wikipedia page makes it sound like there is another one, or part of another one anyway). It’s proven extremely easy to slip into so far, as if she wrote flannel pajamas instead of books. Very comfy. Maybe not earth-shattering, but you can do worse than soft pajamas on a chilly morning.

* It is a great sadness to me that she died before I could give her my book. I suspect the moral of the story is that we ought to thank the people who have a profound influence on our work – thank them directly in a letter, I mean – rather than waiting for the work itself to be our subtler thanks. Because you really do never know!

* Well, okay, she was 76 and had lung cancer. I suppose I could have guessed that time was fleeting.

* I got to meet Lloyd Alexander eight years ago, before we left Philadelphia. He very graciously let me and my friend Sarah come to his house and talk to him for an hour. I gave him a two-page comic story I’d done about him for an anthology called Spark Generators (where cartoonists talked about their influences; mine was one of the few stories about a prose-fiction writer). Anyway, I consider myself lucky to have had that opportunity.

* There are so many people we can never thank, or never thank adequately. Sometimes all we can do is hope our work holds a candle for the next generation in turn.

* How did I get all somber, here? This was going to be a series of amusing vignettes, ending with a coy allusion to the fact that I have received a couple  nice blurbs from real, not-dead, also-beloved authors. I hadn’t realized that the process of questing after blurbs would require me to write letters, but it has and I’m very glad of it. Even when nothing blurblike comes of it, I’ve been given opportunities to thank people whose work has been invaluable to me, and I really appreciate that.

* But ah, Ms. Jones, I regret having missed my chance with you.

Symphony

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I have always written to music.

It started when I was eleven or twelve. I’d curl up on the old brown couch with a spiral notebook across my knees, put on the huge, archaic headphones, and shut out the world. I sometimes suspect the “writing*” was just an excuse to wrap myself in music and ignore everything else.

* Not that I wasn’t writing. My fantasy and SF novels comprised many spiral notebooks of vibrantly dreadful prose. Let it never be said I didn’t produce.

I listened to records in those days. My parents had an idiosyncratic collection — lots of classical mixed in with a few strange relics from the sixties (Smothers Brothers, Tijuana Brass), some kids’ stuff (Muppet Show Album, disco Star Wars), and a shocking amount of Barry Manilow. In a fit of uncharacteristic good taste, I went for the classical.

Romantic symphonies fit my needs best. They were bursting with drama and passion, alternately epic and intimate in scope, just like I hoped my writing might be. My favourites were Brahms’s 4th and Shostakovitch’s 5th, which was written in a later era but has a very Romantic feel to it, so I think it counts. Certainly my twelve-year-old self found a lot of commonality between the two works.

The first movement of the Brahms was unquestionably the ocean, restless and mighty; the beginning of the Shostakovitch was a storm gathering above waves of nodding prairie grasses. My head was already full of wilderness; I’d spent my childhood vacations staring out the car window at the moving landscapes. Those were the scenes these symphonies conjured up for me: red canyons, impenetrable forests, sand hills, clouds making high drama out of of sunlight. And always moving, traveling, questing. I had just read Tolkien at that age, and I think that got mashed together with the music also.

I still love that Brahms. In high school, our youth symphony performed it and I got to experience it from the cello section. Performing a piece almost always solidifies it in my esteem. The Shostakovitch I haven’t listened to in years, but writing this is making me nostalgic for it. In the first movement, if I recall, there was a call-and-response between solo flute and French horn, which struck me (at twelve) as the single most beautiful moment in all of music ever. I wonder how it would sound to me now.

One reason I wonder is that I was reading up on Shostakovitch’s 5th  in preparation for writing this (because that’s how I roll, baby: nerdy), and it turns out the piece has an interesting and complicated history. In 1936, Shostakovitch was in hot water with Soviet leadership because his music didn’t conform to ideals of “socialist realism”. He came back with the 5th symphony, to great acclaim from the Party and the people. But one can’t escape the impression that parts of the piece are slyly subversive, that he’s thumbing his nose even as he appears to be capitulating. The extent of this slyness is still a matter for debate.

I’ve moved away from symphonic music over the years. One reason is that my tastes have broadened a lot; it turns out there’s a lot more music in the world than classical and disco Star Wars. Who knew? Another is that symphonies are complex and deep enough that they require a lot of attention. I’m not good at simply letting a symphony be background noise; I want to stop what I’m doing and let myself be carried off into the ever-shifting landscape of my mind.

You’d think that would still be useful for writing, but it’s not. My writing needs have evolved over time; it’s not just an elaborate escape into daydream anymore. It’s work.

Epic fail

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* My friend Rich brought this article to my attention yesterday: The perils and pleasures of long-running fantasy series. It’s about what (if anything) writers of vast, volume-and-decade spanning epics owe their readers, and whether it’s inevitable that books of such unbridled magnitude will break your heart.

* As someone who’s left people hanging on the cliff, I sympathize. I can only imagine how much George R. R. Martin has changed as a person since beginning A Song of Ice and Fire, or how many new ideas he’s had that he can never implement because of all the thousands of pages already committed to print. How such a series may eventually feel like an albatross around the author’s neck.

* Speaking of which, I bought Game of Thrones last week to read on the airplane. It worked superbly for that purpose, making a long travel day seem shorter (except for the part where my son got irritated with me for reading instead of paying attention to him). But when I got home I didn’t pick it up again. I tried reading some more today, but I dunno. I’m finding it both engrossing and aggravating, and sometimes the latter outweighs the former.

* (Trigger/mature subject warning, after the fold) (Also, spoiler warning) (Also, also, sarcastic Rachel warning)

Continue reading →

Only you, Mary Sue

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I was looking at Ellen Kushner’s blog, as I sometimes do, and I followed a link to another interesting blog post (by Holly Black) about Mary Sues. Not about identifying Mary Sues in literature – which has become quite the sport lately – but about the sport of identification itself. About the fact that “Mary Sue” is coming to mean “that female character I dislike”.

Dilution of a useful term? Maybe. I’m not that convinced it was a useful term, with any meaning beyond the world of fanfiction and self-insertion fantasies. Not that I’ve never used it in a review. I believe I once called the protagonist of Twilight a Mary Sue, which was probably mean of me. But what Black points out is that some of the “Mary Sue” qualities people rail about in reviews are merely features of being the protagonist. Yes, she’s smart and resourceful and able to save the day: she’s the protagonist. It’s what they do.

Anyway, interesting discussion.

Impromptu

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Over the weekend I watched movie Impromptu, about George Sand and Chopin at the beginning of their celebrated 10-year relationship. A friend had been shoving me toward it for years, but I hadn’t felt particularly compelled to try it: I’ve never read any Sand, and I’m not that enamoured of Chopin’s music (piano music often leaves me cold, and I’m not sure why). However, recent discussions my friend and I have had – about being scary, being judged, genre and the idea of branding oneself – led me to think that ok, maybe it was time to watch this movie.

It was wonderful, and exactly what I needed to watch right now.

George Sand, in addition to taking a masculine pseudonym, used to dress in men’s clothing. It was utterly fascinating to see the people around her react with everything from amusement to envy to horror. Chopin, a timid, nervous sort, is utterly terrified of her at first. She falls in love with his music and decides she must also be in love with the man who created the music. She pursues him relentlessly (on the bad advice of an envious friend), which scares and intrigues him (but mostly scares). Only when she puts on a dress and uses her aristocratic title is he able to listen to her — and just barely, at that. She gives up and leaves Paris, but that brief moment of listening has planted a seed in his mind. It’s his turn to pursue her, which he does by looking for her books. They finally meet again, having connected with each other’s art, and it’s STILL difficult. She still scares him; he still shies away from her. There’s some painful fits and starts and negotiation that has to happen before they can meet in the middle, Sand finding a way to moderate her exuberance*, Chopin taking some halting steps toward boldness.

* She’s back in trousers by the end, never fear! And that’s the beauty of it: they’re not giving themselves up, but learning empathy and how to take each other into account.

It’s rare for me to be moved by movie romance (or book romance, alas), but I found this really lovely. And I’m leaving out all the funny parts! Emma Thompson is hilarious as a young noblewoman who fills her house with artists in hopes that some culture will rub off on her, Mandy Patinkin is present in full beardy glory, and then there’s Sand’s children, leading a scion of nobility astray. It was good fun all the way through.