Magical Words

About midway through the publication of my book, Mad Kestrel, my editor’s assistant accepted another job. Since he’d been my primary contact from day one, I was terrified! Who would answer my questions and keep me in the loop? I needn’t have worried -  Stacy’s smart, reassuring and funny, and if she doesn’t know the answer to a question, she won’t quit until she finds it. I’ve been so lucky to work with her, and I’m delighted she agreed to pay us a visit today. Now, without further ado, let me introduce you to Stacy Hague-Hill, editorial assistant at Tor!

“I’m an Assistant Editor at Tor Books, and I love my job. But, while there’s an understanding that anyone whose title involves the word “assistant” must do a lot of scut work, not everyone knows what, in the context of a busy editorial office, being an assistant means. When Misty kindly asked me to write a guest post, I thought I’d track a regular day and see how it shook out as a way to introduce what it’s like to do my job.
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Tags: Misty Massey, Special Guest Stars by Misty Massey
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I work a paycheck-job, as a middle school librarian. Which means that once a year, I am pulled out of my library to serve as a testing monitor, for the two weeks of standardized tests the state requires of our children.

The first portion of the day sees me running up and down halls, fetching supplies for test administrators, carrying messages to principals, making sure students are where they’re supposed to be, and other delightful activities. I’m fairly certain I’ve walked halfway to Mordor in the last three days. The end of the testing day is more of the same, but backwards. Well, except for the walking - that I do facing forwards no matter what time it is. The middle is peaceful. I have to sit in my assigned hallway and make sure things are blissfully quiet. I have a folding papa-san chair I bring for just this purpose, and I usually bring a book.

I have never been one who particularly liked writing longhand. The word processor is infinitely preferable, to me. Trouble is that here I am with a huge chunk of empty time first thing in the morning, and I can’t bring my laptop with me. (It’s a security issue.) So today, I had the wild notion to grab a handful of paper, and a pen, and see what came of it.

Y’all, when the smoke cleared, I had written ten pages of longhand.  And I managed to get my characters out of a boat they’ve been in for days.  When I reached a stopping place, I just sat in my chair for a few minutes, staring at all the pages, and silently cheering. I had no idea I could let myself go so easily with a pen and paper. It’s been a very long time since I even tried.

Yesterday I was begging God to let the testing end soon. Now, I’m restocking my clipboard for next time.

** We’ll be hosting a special guest blogger tomorrow: Stacy Hague-Hill of Tor Books!  Please tune in! **

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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We talk a lot on this blog about being driven to write, the manner in which we write, the focus of our writing. And deadlines. Let me not forget deadlines… Sigh.

Quick deadline update: I managed to get my (okay, Gwen’s) last contracted mystery book off to the editor three weeks early, and the short story for the action booklet for the role playing game based on the Rogue Mage series done. I am now halfway through with the next short story, this one for Strange Brew, an anthology about witches with Jim Butcher. And I am one scene away from being done with the first draft of Skinwalker, an urban fantasy novel about a Cherokee skinwalker, or skin changer. Then I have a bit less than two weeks to rewrite while I am on the road to two conferences. See my webpage about that, if you are in or near Charlotte N.C. or Ohio. Then? June 1? I am done, deadlines met.

At that point, I will actually take off for an extended break for the first time in nearly three years. Extended break, to be interpreted as several weeks. Maybe an entire month. I will rip out my overgrown front garden, put in new soil and over it with black plastic to steam through the summer. I will paint my parlor and maybe my writing room. Heck, maybe my bedroom! I will kayak down some rivers. I will search for funding for my writing project for needy schools. I will be busy doing the things I haven’t done for three years because I am crazy enough to write two books a year and still work full time.

But this blog wasn’t about deadlines, or even my version of rest, it was, and is, about the things that life throws our way, into our paths, like avalanches or barricades, or even armies with guns, that stop the muse, stop the writing, stop everything, because there is just not enough time in the world to write, and live, and breathe, and deal with crises, and bring home the bacon.

Things like health issues, or family illness, or emotional turmoil (drama) in the family. OMG, how do we, as writers who have to be creative and focused, deal with a parent’s divorce, or a brother’s drinking problem, or, heaven forbid, a death in the family? Or maybe just the more mundane issues that make it feel like we are jumping hurdles just to get through the day. For those with kids, it’s illness, doctor visits, dentist visits, soccer games, ballet classes, etc.. For me, it’s laundry, housecleaning, (yes, I know I have a housekeeper service that comes and shovels me out once a month, but I still have to vacuum, sweep, wash clothes and dishes, and keep up between visits) and being the support person for friends and family and their emotional and physical health issues. It is freaking tough. Mind you, I am not whining, not at all. Just talking about the facts of life that affect writers just like they affect readers. Our lives are not any easier just because we got a book or 20 in print. We have to deal with the same problems that anyone dies, and we still have to find a way to be focused and creative and *write*.

I can’t and don’t write when I am on the phone to a friend whose 80 year-old father is running a fever of 103 and being noncompliant about taking Tylenol and standing in a cool shower to get the temp down. This happened this week, late in the day, after doctor’s offices closed. My best pal since I was eight needed me. Do I care about deadlines at times like that? No. Honestly, when someone I love needs me, I chuck the WIP and the deadlines and give the needy one my full attention. It’s what we all do. David has sick kids, and he doesn’t write. Misty ditto. I have sick family members, ditto. Catie, who I am just coming to know, has family responsibilities too. And the writing? Well sometimes it has to take a backseat. Life gets in the way.

And I thank God for that. That I have family and friends and people I love. They (and their problems and their needs) sometimes get in the way of my deadlines.

And I just. Do. Not. Care. Because I do care about my extended family – the people I love.

So, today, after lunch, I will get back to the short story and try to finish the rough draft. And if I get interrupted? Well, them’s the breaks. I’ll write later tonight. Eventually, I’ll get it done.

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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This isn’t, I’m afraid, going to be much of a post. I’m in the home stretch of THE PRETENDER’S CROWN, which has just crested 175K in length (ai!), and which has, oh, somewhere between one and seven thousand words left. I’m hoping it’s around 4K, and then all I’ve got left to do is rewrite the prologue and fix all my NOTES and do a spell check and turn it in.

You would think this would be cause for great celebration. Realistically, it’s cause for an extremely heavy sigh of relief more than delight, and maybe an evening off, and then I have to go directly into doing what Luna calls “author alterations” and most other houses call “galleys” for HANDS OF FLAME, because they were due yesterday and my editor’s assistant managed to get me an extension til Friday, so, yeah, basically no rest for the wicked.

But next week I get to take the week off before starting the fourth Walker Papers novel! Where “take the week off” means “write a short story, and possibly as many as three comic book scripts”. Though if it turns out to be 3 scripts, then I probably won’t start WP #4 until June, and will take *two* weeks “off” to write those other things.

Yes, folks, this is the life of a working writer. Ah, the glamour.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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In the course of speaking about my books, I often tell people that I write “organically.”  And I’m not the only one; I have friends who use the same term when speaking of their own work.  But what does this really mean?

Look up “organic” in the dictionary, and among the several definitions listed there you get the following:  “Forming an integral element of a whole; fundamental” and “having systematic coordination of parts” and “having the characteristics of an organism; developing in the manner of a living plant or animal.”  When speaking of my writing, I actually use the word to describe a process that combines all three of these definitions.  At this point I realize that I’m muddying the waters more than clarifying them, but bear with me.

I outline when I write, thus providing some framework for my narrative and and the evolution of my characters as I procede through a book.  But I don’t outline so much that I actually know exactly what’s going to happen at every point in the novel.  Far from it.  I’ll write down maybe a paragraph for each chapter.  Three or four sentences.  “Character 1 goes to this place.  S/he finds such and such.  This other character shows up.  They get a bite to eat.”  That sort of thing (although hopefully more interesting….)  The rest of the plotting, character development, etc. happens as I write.  And yes, it happens organically.

I know, I know.  I still haven’t said what this means.  This is where it all gets a bit mystical.  When I’m writing, my storylines and the rest just sort of happen.  I can explain this any number of ways:  my characters assert themselves and carry the plot in directions of their choosing; the narrative presents itself to me and I basically transcribe it into book form; subliminally I know what’s going to happen at every point in the book, but I don’t realize that I know this until I actually write it.  As it happens though, none of these explanations is exactly right; and at the same time every one of them is true to some degree.

I know where my books are going from the very beginning — the day I write page one I already know how the book is going to end.  But I have little idea of how I’m going to get from point A to point Z.  Every day that I write, I discover just a little bit more about the story I’m telling and the people I’m writing about.  For example, this past week I needed to write a scene in which a group of Mettai sorcerers use their magic in a battle, and though this magic helps win the conflict, it also has terrible unforeseen consequences.  I knew all of that going in.  But I didn’t know what magic they would use, how this would work against the enemy, or what the unintended consequences would be.  I actually tried to think it through before I wrote the scene and couldn’t.  So I just started writing.  Soon my characters told me which magic they’d use and why.  From there I realized what would happen at the end of the scene.  And this ending fit in perfectly with something I’d set up in the narrative literally two books ago.

Remember those definitions?  “Forming an integral element of a whole; fundamental”; “having systematic coordination of parts”; and “having the characteristics of an organism; developing in the manner of a living plant or animal.”  They’re all there.  The solution to the battle scene problem came to me not because I tried to impose an answer on the narrative, but rather because I let it flow out of what had come before.  Had I tried to force something, chances are it wouldn’t have worked.  Instead, I listened to my characters, or, if you prefer, I allowed the narrative to unfold as it was supposed to, or, I knew what had to happen and just had to be patient with myself until I “remembered”.  Whatever.  To my mind, the best way to explain it is to say that it grew out of what I’d already done and laid the foundation for what needs to come next.  That’s why it worked so well and connected seamlessly with elements of the story that had been established long before.

That’s organic writing.  I begin with the fundamental elements of storytelling:  a setting for my story, characters, and a basic narrative of the events that take us from point A to point Z.  Then, rather than deciding from the outset how each of these elements is going to develop during the course of the story, I mix them together, in this case by beginning to write without a crystal clear sense of where it’s all going.  My characters interact with each other, with the world I’ve created, with the conflicts and dramas that I’ve thrown in their path.  In other words, the various parts of my story develop symbiotically, feeding off one another, enhancing each other.  The story becomes something more than the sum of its parts.  It awakens, grows, and even appears to take on a mind of its own.  As an author, I can never entirely cede control of my story to this creature I’ve created, but neither can I make it do everything I want it to. 

Pick your metaphor here:  If I’m building a house, I have to follow the blueprint and stay within the external walls.  But if the flow works better with a room moved here, or a wall eliminated there, so be it. Or…..

If I’m gardening, I don’t want to let the cantaloupes overflow their plot and take over where the beans or tomatoes have been planted.  But I can let them roam a bit, give them room to climb up a fence here or wind around a pole there.  Or….

If I’m raising a child, I can’t allow her to live her life without any limits, without any guidance.  But I have to give her the freedom to explore who she is, how she wishes to express her individuality, what she wants to make of her life.

So it is with writing a book.  Develop the fundamental elements, bring them together and allow them to interact, and give them the freedom to grow and evolve on their own.  When I speak of writing organically, that’s what I mean.

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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I don’t know about you, but I could use a break from the Democratic infighting and UN officials pretending to be surprised that Myanmar doesn’t want any Western help, so today’s Friday Fun is all about having a good time!

Here’s three trillion dollars…what will you buy?

Define a word, feed a village! (Careful, though, it’s addictive!)

Watch George tumble! (If you’re a Republican, you can always watch Hillary instead!)

And who can resist….Bubble Wrap!

Next week we’ll be featuring a special guest on Friday, so please don’t miss it! Have a great weekend, y’all!

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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With the impending release of the Speed Racer feature film, I’ve been remembering the original Speed Racer. (Yes, I’m that old. *grin*) While other people were cheering for Speed to defeat the evil genius and win the race at the same time, I was watching for Racer X. Don’t remember him? Racer X was Speed’s racing nemesis, the only driver who ever stood a chance at beating Speed behind the wheel. He wore dark glasses and a hood, and the mystery of who he really was intrigued me far more than anything Speed and his cronies accomplished. It didn’t matter that he wasn’t the hero - not to me.

Before I started writing about pirates, I was working on another novel, one with elves and maps and motorcycle gangs and Renaissance faires. And no matter what I did, I had this sneaky little feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Eventually, after I had 300 pages done, I realized what was bothering me…I was more interested in the secondary character whose story was intertwined with the hero’s than I was with the hero himself. I’d given him all the flaws, all the real dangers, and all the fun. The book was really about him, I just hadn’t noticed. I wasn’t anywhere near as finished as I thought I was, since the whole thing would have to be reorganized. But now that I knew who my protagonist really was, I could go crazy, and give him even more to do.

I’ll be finishing that book this summer, so maybe someday you’ll all get to see it, and tell me if you think I was right. But in the meantime, I’m curious - have you ever run into that problem, of falling in love with a character who isn’t the hero? Writers, what did you do? Readers, who did you fall for?

Tags: Misty Massey by Misty Massey
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Miz Misty is posting this for me… Isn’t she a sweetie! And why am I not posting my own blog? Because my muse and my deadlines got together and …well… read on…

Deadlines loom over me like a sabertooth lion, all teeth and fangs, poised on an overhanging ledge, ready to pounce. It makes me edgy and, well, I need to take off time to relax just to be able to write. Take off time to relax in order to meet deadlines…? Counterintuitive? Yes. It is. But it is fact too. So that is the subject of today’s blog. The counterintuitive-ness of relaxation and how my muse fits in to it all.

First – muses.

I’ve told some of you about my muse. If you have forgotten what he looks like (though how you ever could, I don’t know) here’s the mental picture. He’s a hirsute, baldheaded, six-foot-four-inch-tall Texan with a beer-barrel-belly, wearing a cowboy hat, boots, and a red thong with pasties. He sits in a squeaky wood desk chair with his feet up and crossed at the ankles, resting on the top of an old fashioned, post-world-war-two, wooden desk, while smoking a cigar, drinking bourbon, and sharing his wisdom. His wisdom? It is usually something along the lines of, “Get back to work.” Oh – his boots are red leather. With roses stitched on them.

He brooks no slacking. He cusses with abandon. He sometimes throws things. Sometimes, to make me laugh, he twirls the pasties. His favorite food is pizza. On his desk are dead plants, empty pizza boxes and empty beer bottles. He badly needs a shave. And pants.

But today (which is Tuesday, because I’m writing this early), he is thinking about my deadlines. And he told me to take off tomorrow, which, as you read this, is today. He said to pack up the RV, take off for the mountains, and spend an entire day (Wednesday) on the Green River, relaxing. He told me to ride the two-man ducky and the kayaks down the river, rest, relax and enjoy. So I will. This means that I may not respond to any replies on the blog until Thursday morning. Why? Because I have a deadline. So I am leaving the house, leaving the PC, leaving the WIP, not taking the laptop, to relax.

I am sooo looking forward to it. But for now? Back to the PC. Back to a character who is so tough she scares me. Is she too tough? Too violent? For sure she needs a massage. Maybe a restful day on the river. Hmmm. Maybe I’ll take her with me after all. Just along for the ride, not for work.

Thanks, Misty, for posting this. And thanks for the day off! Hope all you readers are having a great day off too!

Faith

Tags: Faith Hunter by faithhunter
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I don’t typically do my research–hm. I’d better start this again.

I’d been about to say, I don’t typically do my research until after the fact, except that’s wildly untrue. Before I started the Walker Papers, I read every book about shamanism I could get my hands on (and I’m really looking forward to an excuse to buy a few more when I start that series up again in a few weeks! ahahah!). I’ve been an Elizabethan-era buff since I was a little kid, though I’ve got nothing on many of my friends in enthusiasm for the topic. So I do groundwork research before I start, but when I get down to the details…

Well, my manuscripts have a lot of notes in them. Literally: when I’m writing and I can’t, for example, remember what the proper word for the back of a ship is, my manuscript reads, “toward the NOTE: NAME FOR THE BACK OF THE BOAT O.O they went”. Injured a character in a modern-world story? NOTE: LOOK UP HARLEM HOSPITALS. Can’t remember a character’s name? NOTE: FIND OUT HIS NAME AND FOR GOD’S SAKE, CATIE, YOU SHOULD WRITE THIS $#!7 DOWN! I only stop to go find out that it’s called the stern if there’s some reason I can’t continue forward without actually knowing that. There usually isn’t.

I have a friend who–when I’m not working quite as close to the wire as I am now–plays unpaid research assistant. She’ll read my rough drafts and I get emails back full of answers to my NOTES. I’m *desperately* grateful to her for this, and have dreams that someday I’ll be rich enough to make her a paid research assistant. But with my last few books I’ve been tapping into another research resource, which I like to call Livejournal knows all.

It’s amazing what you can ask the internet and get back instantaneous answers on. For HOUSE OF CARDS, I needed, oh, a handful of legal terms that I just didn’t even know enough words about to know where to /start/ looking, much less get the right ones. Turned out there were lawyers and legal aides on my friends list. I needed a high-end fountain pen, the kind that runs to silly expensive. *Lots* of pen buffs on my friends list. I just now needed a couple of translations to Italian and French, and a Latin declamation, and lookit that, one of my friends has a PhD in Latin, which I had no idea until now.

I swear it feels like cheating. I don’t know why (probably because I’m of the last generation to grow up using libraries for research instead of Google, actually, now that I think about it). I mean, it is not in fact cheating to go to people and say, “Hey, you know more than I do about this, can you tell me about it?” That’s precisely what research is. But somehow flinging it out to five hundred people to see if any of them *happen* to know seems like a shortcut somehow.

I *love* it. Usually what I get back is a barrage of information that I sift through and … gosh. Use what’s appropriate. Kind of like real research. Or a barrage that at least gives me the right language to use to find what I /am/ looking for.

So today I’ve been running back and forth from my work computer to my ‘net computer, asking questions and getting answers while I’ve been doing revisions on my manuscript. It’s not the most efficient way to do this–usually I don’t address the NOTES until the very last thing before the spell check–but I’m in the revision stages and have been looking things up anyway, so why not. All part of the process.

Tags: C E Murphy by cemurphy
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About eleven years ago, after my father died, my siblings and I were going through the apartment in which he and my mother had lived the last few years of their lives, when we found the first books I ever wrote.  One of them was called “Jim, The Talking Fish.”  On the cover, under the title and a picture of a green fish saying “Hi”, it says “writen [sic] and illustrated by David Coe.”  The dedication reads “To Dad, who tought [sic] me to play Baseball well.”  The book is “bound” with a piece of yellow yarn.  The other volume we found, which I’ve misplaced, was a book about a pair of eagles who fight off a hunter.  They might have been able to talk, too.  Seems I was in the creatures-that-shouldn’t-be-able-to-talk-but-can phase of my artistic development.  I’m guessing that I was five or six when I wrote them.

Okay, a few notes here.  First off, in the interest of full disclosure I’m guessing that I since I couldn’t spell “written” or “taught” that someone helped me out with “illustrated.”  Second, on the whole “Dad taught me how to play baseball well thing”: my Dad was a stockbroker and must have been in his late forties when I wrote that dedication (he was 43 when I was born).  I think this probably explains why I never fulfilled my dream of making it to the big leagues.  And finally, even back then I was far better at writing than illustrating.  I’m not going to scan in my drawings; you’ll have to take my word for it.

I’m asked quite often when I knew that I wanted to be a writer.  The short answer is that I always knew (my delusionary baseball dreams notwithstanding).  These two books were by no means the only ones my siblings and I found — they were just the first.   There are other novels, as well as nonfiction books on birds, space, volcanoes — pretty much anything I thought was cool.  But the fiction was what I loved most.  I wrote stories constantly, some of them quite funny, many of them utterly bizarre.  I remember being in second, third, and fourth grade and wishing that we could skip math, science, spelling, and the rest, and just spend all of our time writing.

When I was in junior high I developed a habit that persists to this day.  Whenever I experience something — a funny moment shared with friends, a beautiful sunset, some emotional trauma — I begin to write it in my head.  I look for ways to recreate the moment as narrative.  I imagine how I might write the “character” I’m with at the time.  As I say, I started doing this years ago, around the time I was my older daughter’s age.  I always thought I was odd in this way (as in so many others), that I was the only person who did stuff like this.  Turns out, this is fairly typical.  Lots of my writer friends did the same thing as kids, and still do to this day.

The other thing I’ve done off and on for all of my adolescent and adult life is keep a journal.  I haven’t always been diligent about it, and over years the format of my journal has changed.  In high school, college and graduate school I used a notebook and pen — simple, easily portable.  Later I started keeping a computer journal.  Today I blog.  But the impulse has always been the same:  I am driven to write down my observations, descriptions of places I’ve seen, emotional responses to things going on in my life.  And to this day, whenever I travel I bring a notebook and a pen.

Catie, Misty, Faith, and I have spent a good deal of time here at Magical Words writing about the challenges that writers face, be they artistic or financial.  This is a tough way to make a living, as you’ve heard from us time and again.  But we always conclude by saying that a) we love it, and b) we write because we have to, because writing is in our blood.  At RavenCon last weekend several of us on a panel about the business of writing gave this advice to people thinking about a writing career (I’ll paraphrase):  If you’re looking at a career in writing because you think it might be fun and an easy way to make some money, think again; if you’re thinking about a career in writing because you can’t imagine doing anything else, and because stories and characters are clamoring to get out of your head and onto paper, then it won’t matter that the money sucks and the work is hard.

I remember how cool it was when my brothers, sister, and I found that eagle book and “Jim, The Talking Fish.”  It was a light moment in the midst of a long, sad process.  But I didn’t need to see those first books to know that I’d been destined to be a writer all my life.  I’ve been looking at the world through a writer’s eyes for as long as I can remember.

What about the rest of you?  How did your love of the written word first manifest itself?  What was the first “book” you wrote?

Tags: David B. Coe by DavidBCoe
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