A Snowy Day (or three)

I refuse to call winter storms by their media-generated names. Winter storms are as common around Minnesota as rainfall in Washington state, warranting no notoriety. That said, if they are impressive enough, I may remember them fondly based on other events...

There was the massive blizzard of January in 1972 or 1975, when we had to sleep in our neighbors' basement because our electricity was out and they had a fireplace. I was 4 or 7, and that house's furry residents were the models for the black labs in SPOTD. Despite my deep fears of those dogs, I don't remember them being a problem.

There was the Halloween blizzard of 1991, forever connected in my mind with the Twins winning the World Series and me moving into my first house. I happily carried boxes through knee-high drifts, glad to be out of the stinky rental that made me cry.

And there were the blizzards that interrupted performances of The Sound of Music (in high school) and Cinderella (this past spring). Snow + the smell of decaying theaters. Good times.

Today's snow is less than memorable as a weather event. Some flurries off and on. Probably some wind later to swirl it around and make driving hazardous. But warm temps overall (30-32ish) and nowhere to be other than at home mean that, for the most part, this weather "event" is mostly an excuse to sit by the fire and read and revise Lio and Lamb in anticipation of my alpha reader's critique.

Here's the printed text.

My writing habit is to revise online as I write, which slows me down but works best for sustaining an ongoing sense of accomplishment. Then when I pick up the writing the next day, I revise my previous day's work again before moving on.

With SPOTD, I printed out, reread, and revised the entire text (all three books) over the course of a few weeks, sitting in the sun on my deck in the summer. After I broke the series into three books, I further revised and edited each volume multiple times. And as I self-published, I repeated the task several more times with the set text.

I haven't reread much of Lio and Lamb, with the exception of going back once in a while to refrech my memory of a minor character's name or small plot point. I'm uncertain how it will go. I AM certain I will remember this snowfall in connection to the reading.

Here we go...

Nanowrimo 2018

I had no intentions of "winning" Nanowrimo 2018, but I did have a goal. I wanted to write at least 300 words a day each day of November.

Here are the results:

I did it!

I wrote every single day in November -- even book club night, which is my Achilles heel -- for a total of 15,748 words. That's an average of 524 words per day.

My regular writing start time was usually after 9:00 pm, sometimes much later. I often felt an internal push to keep going until midnight so I could post the most words possible before the day's end. After a while, jumping into my story was part of my nightly ritual rather than a "job."

Best of all, the story progressed significantly, and I can sort of see where it is going next.

I have to admit, December has not been as productive. Let's call it a "Nanowrimo" hangover. On the bright side, I've been getting 1-2 hours more sleep per night this month.

It's delightful.

Supporting the Worldbuilders Fundraiser

I've been telling everyone I meet a particular story lately. It's a story that makes me smile. But it also gives me shivers.

It goes like this.

One of my favorite authors, Patrick Rothfuss, started Worldbuilders in 2008. Since then, the organization has raised over $7.4 million for charities such as Heifer International, Mercy Corps, GlobalGiving, and First Book. 

I've donated during the fall/winter fundraiser in the past, throwing my "$10 per chance to win" into the prize pool but never winning anything. Two years ago, I bid on an auction item, which was for a friend of Pat (I don't remember which one) to critique my current writing project. At the time, I had spent a few years developing my created world and about a year writing the middle volume of an imagined trilogy. 

After I made my initial bid, I realized that I wasn't ready to win. My story was too green. I watched someone else win the critique, knowing that I would be ready to bid seriously in 2017 as long as I wrote as much as I could over the next year.

Although I made significant progress on the middle story, I didn't finish it. In fact, I digressed heavily by jumping my focus to the first book in the series. I decided not to bid in 2017.

Now it is 2018, and I have almost 80,000 words of each story written. For reference, I imagine each of them will be 100,000 to 120,000 words when finished. I also have a half dozen very specific questions I would like to ask an expert reader about my characters, point-of-view choices, and the plot's direction. 

When the fundraiser rolled around a few weeks ago, I felt ready to bid. I pored over the offerings at the Worldbuilders auction site, and I decided Pat's agent, Matt Bialer, was the person I wanted to talk to most about what I have and where I go next with the story.

So I bid.

And I won. 

Matt Bialer will be critiquing the first 20,000 words of Lio and Lamb!

I kind of can't believe it. 

Even better, my winning bid will be donated to support the good work of the charity. I encourage all readers to check it out and do likewise.

Happy Christmas to all!

PS I don't need any presents -- I got mine :)

Creating a Map

Looking at the maps of other writers' created worlds is one of my favorite parts of digging into a new fantasy series. Lately, that has been Osten Ard (Williams) and the Realm of the Elderlings (Hobb).
I imagine having my own beautifully drawn map someday, inserted in my books and framed up and proudly displayed in my house.

Tolkien's, Flanagan's, and Martin's worlds are recognizably European, with pseudo-British Isle home bases. I love these fictional realms, but I wanted to do my own thing. I wanted the land to feel more like the land I know and love.

I was inspired by the cleft of the Mississippi River valley, especially on trips to Winona to see Shakespeare at the GRSF. I was inspired by all the windbreaks on homesteads and farms across the sweep of the Great Plains. I was inspired by the badlands and the North Shore and the deep forests up north. My land is this land...

http://www.airum.org/

So, the upper Midwest. But medieval.

When I started writing, I had very little of the created world in my mind. I knew there was a castle, and I knew that castle was built against a cliff at the convergence of two rivers. I imagined the river continuing southward to an eventual sea. I imagined a trio of mountain countries to the north of the castle. And I knew Lio and Lamb were not originally from this castle or its town.

Over the past two years, but especially this summer, the Realm of Aelland has slowly evolved into this:

Look closely and you can see the following features:

* The land is split by the massive Aco River, Mississippi-like in its flow.
* To the west of the river, "Round Villages" of the broad Aco Plains spread out to the coast.
* The northwest is my Badlands, and the northeast is my Northwoods.
* I've included mountains in the north as a sort of boundary and along the east side of the Aco River as a break before the desert. I have no plot in mind for the desert, but I didn't want the plains to continue eastward, and the mountains would affect climate. A desert seemed proper, in any case.
* There is an enormous lake-like bay on the southwest coast.
* A massive curved, paved road crosses the realm from coast to coast, touching nearly all climates and landscapes.

I am happy with most of it, though it seems a little too lumpish.

One of my favorite places is the sacred Isles of Mourning on the southwest tip. I'm not even planning to go there. It's just a part of the country that presented itself to me, the same way characters sometimes present their quirks and personalities to me as I write. I didn't so much invent the place as discover it.

It turns out that there are plenty of artists who specialize in map-making, and for a fair fee they would turn my rough sketch into a lovely map. But I'm not ready yet. As my characters travel, more place names are added. And I have no idea how the world will evolve in the third, entirely unimagined book in the series. I'm pretty sure the characters travel north, into the mountainous Bardlands. But I won't know what they will find there until they hit the road.

Why I Want to Go to Comic-Con (Someday)

Unfortunately for the progress of my novel, much of August was filled with more creative procrastination. Many of the author panels from Comicon San Diego 2017 have been uploaded to YouTube, and I spent some -- cough, too much, cough -- time enjoying them.

Of course I enjoyed seeing some of my favorite authors speak about their craft and process and upcoming work, but I also "met" some fabulous new authors. For example...

The Martian author Andy Weir (I recommended that book to so many people long before the movie came out)
and my new favorite author person Claudia Gray. 

It's not so much that I'm fangirling, although there is some of that. It's more that I want to be them, published by a major imprint and sitting on a panel next to Andy and Claudia and everyone else in San Diego answering questions with funny anecdotes that make the audience laugh.

This is not a new fantasy...

Before my first book was even published, I was invited to speak at the North Dakota Reading Association Convention in Fargo. My talk was more about self-publishing than SPOTD, but the experience hooked me. At each main session (when they were feeding us), I was seated at the authors' table next to serious, published authors. I felt special. And my fellow authors were wonderful. I wanted more.

That summer my book actually came out, and I immediately tracked down the rules for getting a table in the convention hall at San Diego Comicon. It turns out they have a small section reserved for Comicon newbies, and I thought I fit the bill. So I sent in my registration/application along with the requisite copies of my book. While I waited for my eventual rejection letter, I dreamed about sitting on a folding chair at a wobbly little table in a corner at the very back of the hall and seeing Steven Spielberg or Nathan Fillion or Neil Gaiman walk past. It was probably more about having a backdoor pass to the show than being a part of the show at that point.

Although I wasn't selected for a table, I am glad I tried. In retrospect, I would have been so far out of my depth there back in 2011. But you can't get what you don't ask for, and I'm glad I asked.

While I listened to the 2017 panels, I opened a second window, read about the featured authors' books online, and then (when my resistance was low) ordered them or (when a calmer head prevailed) requested them from my local library.

A few favorites:

Space... The Final Escape Panel
     A fascinating look into the minds that create hard sci-fi. I learned that I will probably never attempt the genre, as the technical expertise needed is daunting. So much respect for those who can and do. These are the kind of nerds I love: passionate about the getting the details right.

Lucasfilm Publishing: New Star Wars Panel
     Although I love Star Wars, I almost skipped this video. I always assumed that novelizations of movies were hack jobs. I'm glad I watched this and learned that I was wrong. Lucasfilm Pub has hired serious talent to expand the Star Wars universe.

Genre-Blending: How and Why?
    I only made it halfway through Red Rising, but my sister loves the series. Could this be part of the reason?

Pierce Brown. 

As nice as it is to watch the uploaded videos, I am aware that not all panels were taped. Panels like this one:

What's Hot in Young Adult Fiction

• The seventh edition of this panel is one of the best ever! It features Jennifer Armentrout (The Problem with Forever), S. Jae-Jones (Wintersong), Lish McBride (Pyromantic), Brendan Reichs (Nemesis), Beth Revis (Star Wars: Rebel Rising), Megan Whalen Turner (Thick as Thieves), Kiersten White (And I Darken), and Nicola Yoon (Everything, Everything). That's Sunday at 1:00pm in 29AB. Hosted by Nathan Bransford.

So despite lovely Youtube access to many of the author panels, going to San Diego is definitely still on my bucket list, whether as an artist or attendee. Even though you hear stories about lines that stretch around the block to get into certain panels, I don't think that would be an issue. Most of the wide panning shots at these author panel venues revealed half-empty rooms. How ironic. The backbone of the con is actual comics + sci-fi/fantasy books. But film/television and celebrities seem to be the bigger draw.

Another irony: At our humble Nerdcon: Stories in Minneapolis, those rooms would have been overstuffed. Lines around the block. These are the story-loving nerds' biggest celebrities.

An Inspiration

Inspired by Wales' Bodnant Gardens, one of my favorite new ideas is for a particular "garden" landscape.

Imagine a tended garden as large as a state park, with perfectly manicured flower beds, paths that wander through curated forest, benches for resting and viewing picturesque scenes, lovely brick houses where you can break your travels, and helpful rock steps over each rivulet.

The Queen's Park.

Now imagine what the same garden looks like a generation or two after the monarchy has fallen. Wild, unfettered... Still astonishing in natural beauty, but dangerous as well.

Castle Research, 2017

Summer!
Travel!
Edward I's campaign to subjugate the Welsh with an Iron Ring of mighty castles (sarcastic exclamation point)!

Conwy Castle, Wales

Which really boils down to lots of awkward selfies and pictures of indistinguishable rock walls.

I learned a lesson from my 2015 trip to castles in the south of England: I need to take more immediate notes while traveling. And so, at each Welsh site I allowed myself to look ridiculous, stopping often to type up notes (or dictate them to Dragon Dictation if no one was near me) and thus enduring the unwarranted scorn of fellow castle visitors whose looks as they passed me shouted, "You are in a historical site! Enjoy the moment! Turn off your phone and stop texting!"

Those uncomfortable moments were worth it. I returned with 12+ single-space pages of notes -- descriptions of what I was seeing and ideas for the new series I am writing.