Three Skips

I started accruing my book collection in my late teens.  Not too many early on, since I moved house a lot.  A couple of shelves of books.  Then a full bookshelf, multiple bookshelves, double-stacked bookshelves.

Since I moved house every couple of years, this made for a major undertaking in moving, so finally reaching the financial point of being able to put a deposit on a house (and starting the decades-long process of actually buying it) meant I no longer had that regular struggle to get all the books wherever.

Ironically, once I settled in for what turned out to be a sixteen-year stay, I switched to audio and ebooks and hardly bought any new physical books at all.  This precious hoard became decoration and dust-collectors, and when it came time to move once more, I bit the bullet and gave away all the books.

Well, I kept Diana Wynne Jones, Calvin & Hobbs and Ruth Manning Sanders.  And my own books, of course.  One bookcase worth of books.

Since I've moved into a place that was fully furnished already, I had to do some severe downsizing.  Donated clothes to the clothes charities, towels to the RSPCA, and the contents of my kitchen to a lady who had just separated from her husband and had literally nothing but her kids and a car that would not fit all the things she'd like to take away.

Furniture seems very difficult to sell these days, even at nominal prices.  I gave away most of it, and the rest went out onto the curb, for the opportunistic passerby, or the couch-munching crusher truck booked with the local council.

Everything else went into three skip bins, in a neat illustration of how much junk you can accumulate in sixteen years, or how something quite useful becomes junk when you have nowhere to put it, and no more time to get it into the hands of those who would be glad to have it.

I'm still a little confused about the furniture.  Last time I had a garage sale, the furniture went first, to professional resellers.  Now, it seems no-one wants it.

Anyway, this took up all of my head space, especially since I was also arranging for a cat enclosure and dividing door to be built at my new place (to separate my cats from the resident dogs, and all the local birds).  I'm somewhat more rural now (outskirts of Sydney rather than in the Bankstown area), and have a slightly longer commute in which to do some quality writing.

I haven't written a word for nearly a month.

This is pretty amazing for me, since writing is what I do for enjoyment, and I like the stories I'm working on, but moving stress ate up all my mental energy.

I'm looking forward to getting back into it.  Last time I worked on Tangleways, I'd just put Eluned into the infirmary. :D

Status - February 2020

As y'all noticed, my output over the last year significantly slowed down, in part because I'm finding Tangleways challenging.  An odd thing, given I have a very good idea of what I want to write in it.  I think, because I consider Pyramids the best book I've ever written, I keep worrying that the direct sequel won't live up to it, and keep trying to get every word right.  Giving myself permission to just write the book I want is important.

On the plus side, I am writing a ton lately, but that's because I put Tangleways down for the moment to give myself some head space, and went back to a silly side-project I've been writing on-and-off for a couple of years.  It's a high school romance with a lot of explicit sex, which definitely doesn't fit the rest of my output - I ususally don't even put sex scenes in my books because mostly they're unnecessary to the story.  But I fell in love with the characters, and have been having a lot of fun writing 'Firsts'.  [I'll probably publish that under a pen name, since it's completely off-genre, but I'll link to it from here.]

Apologies to all those waiting for Tangleways!  I've been keeping you on a chain for quite a while now, but I promise not to pull a McKinley!  Once I've gotten Firsts (and maybe Seconds) out of my system, I'll definitely have given myself enough distance to look at what I've done on Tangleways with clear eyes, and I'm already finding myself looking forward to getting back to it.

First Lines

A big deal gets made about first lines.  They're the hook, the main chance to catch a reader's interest.  With novels, this is more a first paragraph rule than a first line rule, but I thought it would be an interesting exercise to list off the first lines of all my books (including any unpublished partials longer than a single chapter).

This is roughly in the order the stories were initially written, rather than publication, though of course the first lines may have changed considerably since the first draft.

---

Jame, scraping unruly brown locks out of his eyes, called Piotr every foul name that he could think of, including the ones the herdsmen called their sheep when they wandered off, but he said them softly, muttering under his breath, because Piotr would do more than call him names if he heard him.

Stairs that circled down and down and down, away from the dim light which was the night sky into a shadowy pit which resounded with echoes born a thousand years past.

A barefoot, smoke-scented girl sat above the River Milk.

"You two are disgusting."

"Nervous, beloved?"

They'd been poking through her gear again.

The Danai.

A lavish display of women.

Arlen EidAren refused to believe that someone could be following her.

"And then what?"

The inn fell sideways.

There was a point where you just had to stop waiting for the prince to ride over the hill, and take matters into your own hands.

Taine held one long-fingered hand against the plasglass and smiled.

The first few weeks in Jorbarra, Teale Rameidin was blithely unaware of the Mage Trap.

"Bloody Snakes."

Sunlight on metal.

Hands gripping her wrists.

After a morning spent sorting through the previous Champion's library, both Soren Armitage and the aide lent her by the Chancellor were so dust-laden that they were beginning to blend into their surroundings.

Looking north, Gentian Calder could make out the shadow of land.

Where the FUCK am I????

April Fool's Day. 

It's one thing to decide to save the universe, another altogether to find a way to go about it.

Wow – feels like forever since I've written.

ShhooTHuMP!

Even ignoring his nightmare predicament, Fallon DeVries would be glad to get back to the Arkathan and away from the ritual of saying goodnight to an idealised statue of his mother and sister. 

"The following students will report to the Vice-Chancellor's office at second bell."

Fifty-seven pence until Sunnesday.

Madeleine Cost's world was a tight, close space, a triangular tube tilted so her head lay lower than her feet. 

Sunlight picked out motes of dust, and burnished mellow wood to match Arianne Seaforth's hair as she strolled through the Southern Nomarch's library. 

There are no real surprises in an MMO.

The longer sentences, of course, tend to give a better idea of the story, but I think my favourite will ever remain "The inn fell sideways."  A most dramatic start indeed.  [The story involves an entire inn (with about 50 occupants) being transported instantly right smack to the centre of the deadly and abandoned land of magic will magic your ass.]

"Zero Difference" Worldbuilding

Sylvia Kelso, a writer friend who has had a large influence on my own writing, once riffed on Barthes' "writing degree zero" (in regards to writing without regard to the conventions of language) to describe the kind of worldbuilding I do as "zero difference".

This was in reference to Champion of the Rose, where I'd built a 'bi-normative' world.  The story did not touch on the terrible discrimination and pain that non-heterosexual people regularly face in our own world - the protagonist never discusses or even thinks about her sexuality.  Characters are shown in a range of situations - committed m/f or f/f relationships, disappointed in or longing for past relationships, or happily flitting from lover to lover, guided only by opportunity and personal taste.  I also built into that world the concept of 'thirds' and 'tribonds' to handle different ways society would expect same-sex people to approach conceiving children.  But this was just in the background: never underlined or directly examined.  Zero difference worldbuilding involves making massive changes to a status quo imbalance, and presenting it without remark.

In almost all of my books I do exactly the same thing with the role of women.  The Darest, Eferum, Touchstone and Medair books have no societal sexism (though individuals are free to be asses).  Women have the same inheritance rights, rights to own property, right to rule, and to pursue careers, as anyone else.  I don't discuss how this came about, or how awesome it is: it just is a fact of the world, like gravity.

There are a few reasons I build 'zero difference' worlds, but a primary one is to move away from the limitations of stories I have already read.

I Can So Do It

I have long sought stories of "girls doing stuff".  Often, the books I cheerfully gulped down were "girls can too" stories.  A girl in a sexist society is forbidden from doing something, and wins through adversity to stand triumphant (often assuming and discarding a boyish disguise) having saved the colony/won the battle/defeated the Dark Lord AS A GIRL! (*gasp*)

These stories are a lot of fun.  Hunting, one of my earlier novels (in order of writing), is set in a structurally sexist kingdom (somewhat isolated from a wider world without such inequality), but I put her in boy's clothing specifically to avoid time spent telling the protagonist Girls Can't Do That.  I've loved many a story of girls proving that they Can So Do It, but at the same time Hunting is my only book where I've even touched on that dynamic because the world itself limits how you tell your story.

Even if you allow your main female character to Do Stuff in a structurally sexist world (by putting her in boy's clothes, or giving her a Get Out of Gender-Jail Free card, or showing her valiantly Doing "Women's Stuff" because Women's Stuff is Also Important, by setting the story in a structurally sexist world, the story often revolves around and repeatedly has to deal with gender limitations.

An (unmarried) girl in such a world is unlikely to be sexually experienced, which considerably changes her dynamic in romances.  Tasks such as investigation are endlessly complicated when a woman would cause comment or scandal simply by her presence at, say, a race course or a public tavern.  A woman's expertise and suggestions are likely to be dismissed in worlds where they are held incapable of non-domestic skills.

And the 'cost' to the story is time.  Time devoted to overcoming the problem of being female in order to tackle the problem that is the plot.

It's not easy being

Of course, sometimes the plot is primarily about being female.  Books that directly examine and hold up to the light challenges faced by women (or people of colour, non-cis people, non-het or differently-abled people) are incredibly important.  Many readers find it a gift and a direct aid to witness a character in a book struggle with the same issues that are a central concern of the reader's daily life.

The character(s) might overcome those challenges, test different methods of tackling them, or be injured and retreat from them.  The importance is in the acknowledgement, on shining a light on both the dystopian-level oppressions and the small, silent shames that are delivered to people who are not sitting on the very top of the privilege pyramid.

My particular interest as an author, however, is not holding up a mirror, but creating a window to somewhere else.

Second 'Verse, Same as the First

I've walked through thousands of fantasy worlds.  There have been some very unlike our own, but the vast majority are more than familiar.  Even if there are gods who can enforce their edicts, even if physics is debatable and magic a wild card altering all manner of expectation, these massive variances seem to make little difference to culture.  Humans are divided into women who are domestic and men who are in charge.  Heterosexuality is not only common, but mandated, with transgression punishable by law.  Civilisation seems inextricably linked to a low melanin count.

At times when reading I feel as if stories are trying to lace us into a corset of "this is how it is" and refusing to let us breathe.  We are being told over and over that some things are inevitable.  Not only are they inevitable, but they are the primary aspect of our Selves, and to be x or y or z  means that we must absolutely, inescapably devote large amounts of time to dealing with mandatory hate.

Loosening the stays

So one of the reasons I both seek out and write "zero difference" worlds is simply to breathe.  To not shower my characters with major threats and micro-aggressions, to not make prejudice against that character their one abiding truth, their constant preoccupation, and the required focus of the plot.  To show that a person can simply be x or y or z, and also a and b and c, while focusing the majority of character time and energy on j.

With me 'j' is usually the morality of mages, or dissonance caused by time dislocation, or bonds of rule or friendship, with a side order of frustrated artist.  And I want to put my characters through those questions, not set them on the old, familiar treadmill of "girls can't do that".

Modelling possibility

Another reason I enjoy "zero difference" worlds is to take a next step.  In the Darest books, I began to explore what social constructs would develop in a bi-normative world.  In the Singularity Game series I'm questioning gender by introducing virtual body-hopping.  In the Trifold Age books I hamstrung colonialism - the period of European invasion on the back of gunpowder and disease - by introducing gods who "Answered" and protected their various peoples.

That is not to say that zero difference worlds are Pollyanna wishful thinking.  Hamstringing a few invasions, of course, won't necessarily stop people from hating, fearing or demonising other races, any more than interventionist gods necessarily erase institutional sexism - Gods, after all, can be racist and sexist too.  But limiting colonialism can be used to fiercely undercut the terrible lie that is the White Superiority narrative.  Changes such as this allow me to look into a world where the myriad African kingdoms whose names we're never even taught in school were not dismantled to the point where people deny they ever existed. Where English is not a dominant language, and the influence of the Egyptian social imperative of Ma'at directly opposes the concept of 'serf'.

Because one of the real joys and pleasures of a zero difference world is not treating what we have now as inevitable, true, and correct.  There is room for more worlds than that.

On Writing, the 2015 AKH edition

I gotta say, I just love my writing situation.

I love writing, of course.  Making up worlds, putting people in them, adding unfortunate circumstances and then spinning out the consequences.  So. Much. Fun.

And I love being read.

I love that other people can walk into worlds that I have created.  I get a huge kick out of watching readers react to certain twists, or seeing which characters they fall for, or whether they spotted the clever thing.  Fan mail is awesome, and I'm an inveterate ego-searcher on Google, and really enjoy the discussions about my books.  Even the negative ones can be enlightening, though I often read them with a raised eyebrow or a 'well, all that went over your head didn't it?' expression.

I'm more mindful of probable reader response now, when I write, though I usually write the things I want to write anyway.

For that reason (among others), I love self-publishing.

I particularly love being able to write whatever the fuck I want, even YA including swear words.  I'll take the occasional one star review for swearing if I think it's character-appropriate. :D

Being able to write non-commercial stories (which, frankly, most of mine are when you look at what is popular and what I choose to write) is a big bonus for me.  I'm happy not to have to fret about not being able to sell the next book in a series, even if it has, say,  a...subdued critical response like Pyramids, or really low sales numbers like Stained Glass Monsters.  I can still happily work on The Sleeping Life, which is the kind of 'quiet' novel without a big hook that would struggle to get accepted at any publisher.

And I can embark on something off-the-wall, like Snug Ship (first in the Singularity Game series), which has a ton of wish fulfilment and a complete over-indulgence in my addiction to MMOs (and, uh, an ending that will make readers want to strangle me, if only for the pun in the final sentence), and choose exactly how much explanation of gaming terms I stick in.  Readers who are gamers will find it effortless, and there's a glossary for everyone else.  I get to make that call.

Self-pub isn't without its down sides (I'll have to get around to writing up my most negative self-pub experience one day), and I've got plenty of ground to cover before I can hope to be a full-time writer - in part because I choose to always prioritise the fun over tedious things like marketing, but also because I live in Sydney.  But every so often I look at how my life is going because of self-publishing, and can only stop and appreciate the moment.

I'm getting paid to have fun, and people randomly email me compliments.

^^

Status Update: Drafts and Games

This has been a go-slow writing time for me after pushing myself to get Hunting out.  Drafting Pyramids is fairly research-heavy comparatively, since though I have a passing familiarity with the various cultures I'm playing with - and intend to distort them almost out of recognition - I still need to increase my understanding of their starting points before the alternate circumstances kick in (technically the alternate starts in 18th Dynasty Egypt, but the main impacts don't hit 'til later).

Not that I haven't started getting words on the page.  This book (and the next few) are roughly plotted out in my head, but I've put it on hold for the moment to prepare to switch to Bones.  [Er, prepare by being distracted into writing some smut.]  Bones will be done by the end of the year (there's really only some revision and adjustment to be done on that - the first draft was at about the 9/10 point).  [I'm debating pushing it over to the beginning of January just for award cut off dates convenience - we'll see.]

I'll start on that once my mental energy has recovered - it's been chewed up the last few weeks by a somewhat stressful project at my day job, and entertaining domestic issues, not least:

That was fun to come home to.  Both the power and the phone line attach to that pole, so, yeah...

The biggest consumer of my free time for the next few months is likely to be Final Fantasy XIV.  FFXIV was the second MMO released in the Final Fantasy series and tanked soon after launch thanks to severe lack of content.  It was pulled, revised, and has just gone into open beta.

It has swallowed me whole.

Fortunately I do most of my quality writing on the train to work in the morning, so this does not mean all writing progress stops.  And the mid-level doldrums are sure to hit and make the game less attractive.

Final Fantasy XI was my first full-on MMO.  I lived and breathed it for a while, and then crashed and quit.  That seems to be my standard operating procedure with MMOs.

I always name my MMO characters after my book characters, and FFXIV has Rennyn.  This is Rennyn's current mid-level mage costume (it's not class specific - her main class is Thaumaturge, and I am looking forward to that armour set very much).

I'll be playing on Gungnir, if anyone wants to say "Hi".  You'll probably find me fishing.