welcome to camp telophase

Quick beta read?

Thu, 19 Jan 2023 19:40:16 GMT

I've got enough now, thank you! :)

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I have been writing and rewriting the opening of Deadfall, and I'd like someone who hasn't read the previous version, either as a beta or when I posted it under lock last year, to read the first 1450 words and answer a couple of questions.

I suppose I should mention the genre: secondary-world fantasy inspired by Italy and central Europe of the 30 Years' War era.

1) What questions are raised in your mind? Are they the sort that result from story-killing confusion or the sort that intrigue you to read on to learn more?
2) Would you keep reading? If not, at which point would you stop and put the book down?

Those who have beta-read are welcome to read and comment, but as you already know the answers to questions I am attempting to raise in this section, it'll be harder to figure out how they land to a new audience. :)

I'm not looking for grammar/spelling type stuff here, but a broader overview as to whether or not this opening is working. Copy editing will come later, when I've got the thing figured out.

ANYWAY, drop a comment here and I'll DM you a Dropbox link to the Word doc. You can email or DM me your response.

THANK YOU!

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Tue, 02 Aug 2022 19:01:18 GMT

I'm currently reading the first book of Brian McClellan's second powdermage trilogy. Haven't read the first trilogy yet because I wasn't grabbed by the Amazon sample, but I might go back to it.

Anyway, the MacGuffin in this book resembles the MacGuffin in mine fairly closely in form and effects, although not in its use in the plot except for one scene. Which is totally fine, because these things happen. But if mine gets published I can tell that I'm going to have people saying "Did you steal that from McClellan?" and I'm going to have to explain that no, I stole it from Glen Cook and gave it a faint whitewashing of Skyrim.

BTW, the Midjourney AI bot can now be invited to Discord servers with less than 1000 members. Caveats: you'd need a free trial account to use it with the 25-image limit, or a paid account to do more, the images are still subject to their content restrictions*, and the images would also be visible over on the Midjourney Discord (hence the content restrictions). But given how busy the server is, I'd be very surprised if anyone even saw it.

So: given those caveats, is there any interest in me spinning up a Discord and inviting y'all along with the bot?
It would allow someone with a free account a chance to mess with the AI without having to dive into the main Midjourney Discord, and look on and talk about it without a bunch of randos.

As these things go, I'd expect engagement in the near future, then we'd all forget about it and go elsewhere, but that's how they do.

View Poll: #27348

* I've had prompts that generated results that looked vaguely like artistic nudity that haven't been removed. OTOH when I was rating images and came across one that I'm 99.999% sure someone used a copy of goatse to generate, you can bet I reported that puppy at the speed of light.

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What have I been up to recently?

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 17:36:34 GMT

Mostly being somewhat sick? Sporadic GI thing off and on for a week that also included exhaustion, probably made worse by dehydration. Was ill Sunday a week ago, almost passed out in the shower Monday, I assume due to dehydration and overheating. Called off work Monday. Went in Tuesday and Wednesday, but Wednesday afternoon the GI thing came back, and I called off Thursday and then Friday because I felt so sluggish.
( Cut for desk, IKEA, exercise... )
Anyway! myrialux commissioned a painting of Burn and Calli from Deadfall/Deadwater from yhlee for me as a surprise! :D Go see it here on his DW.

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I have a music!

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 22:02:08 GMT

I traded yhlee a Music for the Yoonifier random story prompt generator. In Deadwater, there's reference to a song circulating that misrepresents the events of Deadfall*. I of course moaned to yhlee that it meant I had to write the damn thing, and what with one thing and another I am currently eight verses in, and using traditional ballad meter, and more-or-less fitting it to "The Huntes upp," ('The Hunt is Up," a traditional ballad). When I offered to make him a personalized random prompt generator, he asked what I wanted in return and I remembered him saying something about how it might be fun to arrange a Renaissance ballad tune...

*If you're new here, fantasy novella-in-progress and novel-in-progress.

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Horse people!

Wed, 08 Jun 2022 19:32:08 GMT

Who know anything about draft horses. XD Does this make sense, or would you look at it askance? (I frankensteined the description from a webpage on draft horses.)

As the bargemaster handed Calli into the Pretty Pelia, she noted that the tow horse was a large draft sorrel, with a deep, strong foot, not the mule she expected.

From what I gather, most horseboats are pulled by smaller horses unless they're pulling heavier loads, but I have the bargemaster explaining they're picking up a load of limestone after the passengers get off. I mostly needed something to hint that Calli knows a bit about horses.

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Publisher algorithmic acumen

Wed, 18 May 2022 14:46:30 GMT

I'm on the mailing lists for a few academic publishers, because I like to poke through their lists when they have sales on for useful history, anthropology, etc. books for writerly research.

I suspect I'm not the only one. Today I'm looking at geography books at Routledge, because one of my side projects is a map of the larger world of my book, which I should really get around to naming one day, and I'm now mildly panicking about weather, climate, landforms, etc. and I want a good basic geography-cartography book to look at. On the page for An Introduction to Geological Structures and Maps, which might actually be a wee bit advanced for what I'm doing (and is expensive enough I'll ILL it if we don't already have a copy in the library), I happened to scroll to the bottom and spotted the Recommended For You section...
( cut for suspense )
That's a list of books for writers if ever I saw one.

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Wed, 11 May 2022 21:09:10 GMT

I'm heading into my edits on Deadwater and need to figure out what my beginning actually is, and managed to serendipitously come across this post where an editor critiqued a number of openings authors submitted. That link goes to the Adult Fantasy category, but she's got other posts for other genres.

I'm going through it and taking notes for my own use, keeping in mind that each of these critiques is specifically aimed at the entry in question, but quite a lot of it is universal.

But I just hit "I might be a bit jaded because I read so many unpublished novel openings per year, but I feel that starting a novel with a character disoriented and in pain is a trope and probably won’t stand out to agents," and OH LORD YES so many self-published fantasy novels on Amazon start like this! If they don't start with the main character disoriented and in pain, they start with the MC running from pursuit, or sneaking through a location on the way to their job which is about to go hideously wrong.

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Commissioned art!

Mon, 09 May 2022 15:45:02 GMT

I celebrated completing the draft of Deadwater back in January by commissioning art from Adam Barker (Satans_Masque; Adam Barker on Artstation; adambarkerart)

Click here for a larger version

If it's too dark to see much, your monitor isn't calibrated correctly. :) I do empathize: my work monitors are cheap and cannot be calibrated properly so it's a bit muddy, but the image is GLORIOUS on my home monitor which is very much not cheap because I do art there. If you're stuck with a terrible monitor, I used Photoshop to crank the brightness up so you can see the details, at the expense of pretty much everything else in the image. XD

Anyway! If you care about the process of commissioning and what I asked for, and what he suggested, read on!

With a bit of discussion between us, we settled on illustrating a scene from Deadfall, where Calli and Burn sit in an inn. The actual scene is the final paragraph, but the rest sets it up.( cut for passage )

I blathered at him about Caravaggio, chiarascuro, and my favorite genre of "Dramatically Lit People Sitting Around Tables in Early Modern Europe," and dumped a giant list of reference links on him, which he took in stride. I'd mentioned drawing the viewer into the picture by setting it up as if you were the one talking to them, and he took that idea and, inspired by the first-person drawings of Kim Jung Gi (kimjunggius), took it a step farther and incorporated the hands of the local that Calli and Burn are talking to.

He kept me appraised of the various steps, and would show me concept sketches, character designs and color studies, having me pick from various options, and we ended up with what you see. :)

I am thrilled with the end result, and would recommend Adam Barker for any commission work you want done. :)

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Interesting books I have encountered while on the Deadfall/Deadwater journey...

Tue, 11 Jan 2022 17:17:48 GMT

Not in any particular order. This is just a small selection of the books I've come across or used, and basically all the ones I've read or downloaded from the library at work aren't on here because that's far, far too many to deal with. Links are Amazon affiliate links, for the hell of it.

Books I've used for research or inspiration: ( Read more... )

Books waiting in stacks (physical or digital) for me to get to:( Read more... )

Books I have in sample form on my Kindle to decide whether I want to drop the cash and put them in one of the aforementioned stacks:( Read more... )

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GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!!!!!!!!!

Sat, 08 Jan 2022 04:48:30 GMT

I am DONE WITH THIS DRAFT!

It clocks in at ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND FOUR HUNDRED SEVENTY FOUR words! (Not counting the approx 26K of Deadfall.)

And here is my VErY DEEP AND TOUCHING, EXTREMELY WELL-WRITTEN final line, which you will remember for ALWAYS:

[INSERT VERY TOUCHING ENDING PARAGRAPH OR TWO RIGHT HERE AND THIS FUCKER IS DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE]

(In all seriousness, I feel I need to reread the whole thing to come up with the proper resonances that should be here.)

Anyway. DOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!

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In search of the sublime (and numinous, and eldritch)

Wed, 05 Jan 2022 18:55:29 GMT

I've been watching my brain start to slide into Revisions Mode as I near the end of Deadwater--my plan is to give myself a couple of weeks if I possibly can,* then print it out and read it all together as a book, making notes, before I swing into revising.

*I know months is often recommended, but ADHD. Sorry.

Anyway, I'd really like to play up moments of the sublime, numinous, and eldritch as much as I can, and thus I seek recommendations from you as to prose, fiction or nonfiction, that evokes those feelings in you. (Music and art recs also appreciated, but it's not my primary focus as I'm trying to feed words into my brain for this.)

Sublime, in the general Romantic (not little-r romantic) sense that's embodied in Kaspar David Friedrich's landscapes (7-min video on Friedrich here, article on the sublime in philosophy here), the sense of awe, respect, immanence and maybe even terror at perceiving things greater than yourself (which is why I think the eldritch is part of this). I tend to get it from contemplating deep time, deep space, and the nature writing of Robert MacFarlane, among others.

I also get it from that breed of manga and anime that slowly explores small mysteries, like Mushishi, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou and Aqua and Aria (the ones set on a Mars that's terraformed to look like Venice).

The numinous (Wikipedia link) is closely related to the sublime, but for me it seems a little closer to the religious or sacred in that the sense of awe is related to other beings or intelligences, instead of just all things greater than oneself, if that makes sense. The "Piper at the Gates of Dawn," chapter in The Wind in the Willows, Mushishi, Mononoke (the stylized anime, not Princess Mononoke, although PM has its moments of that near the end with the forest spirit). Many parts of the Moomintroll books also have this.

Eldritch is of course on the awe-ful (in the old sense of the term) side of the sublime, and I'm looking for subtle eldritch, not the full-on ZOMG THE SOUL-CRUSHING TERROR, THE TENTACLEs, THE TENTACLES!!! that you get in full-on Lovecraftian pastiche, more the gnawing sense of creep you get when something is not right. While I appreciate T. Kingfisher's The Twisted Ones and the like, I'm looking for stuff that's more like the bits near the beginning, where the MC is just starting to feel things are off, and not the middle and end when the MC is smack in the middle of Weirdland.

Anyway, throwing that out there and seeing what y'all can come up with. Now it's back to the word mines to see how much of this story I can produce today. Woo!

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Wed, 05 Jan 2022 04:21:26 GMT

Wrote TWO AND A HALF CHAPTERS today! Okay so the first two were fairly short, 1200 and 1700-ish words respectively and the half-chapter was about 1200 words, but the total was at the top of my daily output. Ignoring all the days I wrote 0 words, which is most of the past year and a half, I seem to average 1500-2000/day, ranging from 300 at the bottom to 4500 at the top.

I think it is no coincidence that the 4500 words days contain scenes I’ve been thinking of for over a year and the 300 word days are ones that are just vague lines in the outline like “Menzo does his thing and X happens.”

So, just under 92,000 words right now, 30.5 chapters written, 4.5 projected chapters to go, 5 days before I have to go back to work. Woo!

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My writing technique (so far)

Mon, 03 Jan 2022 16:18:07 GMT

A couple of people on my DW have been talking about their writing techniques. As I’ve recently left a couple of long comments on Reddit about mine, from the lofty heights of a total of 110,000 words in two years on a third-draft-stage novella and unfinished novel, I’m posting them here. (Mostly because they were to people who were in the same place I was before the switch flipped and I was able to actually produce a coherent story, not because I’m an expert. And I want to keep them for reference as I’ve posted variations of them several times.)

( Read more... )

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Mon, 03 Jan 2022 02:54:58 GMT

this is just to say...

...I am 85,000 words in on Deadwater and am barrelling down the final stretch to get this draft DONE.

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Sun, 18 Jul 2021 01:25:26 GMT

I feel like I'm truly a writer now. I had to stop writing this evening for fifteen minutes to google "italian renaissance pornographic books" for this scene.

Other searches today include "italian renaissance domestic staff" and "italian renaissance reception rooms," and I assure you they are not directly connected to the above query, even though the scenes are in the same chapter.

ok context, one character is snooping in another character's library

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BPAL

Fri, 16 Jul 2021 13:55:30 GMT

I still periodically buy perfume, but I never actually get around to posting about it. I'm posting about this one a couple of months after I got it, because I wore it today and just happened to remember.

Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab Duets Italian Lemon Peel and Orange Blossom Perfume Oil.

I got it because it reminded me of the milieu of Deadfall and Deadwater, obviously. :) What it smells like for the first half hour or so is, basically, formal Froot Loops. Then the top notes wear off and there's a soft semi-floral scent underneath that's a bit vanilla-y and a bit herbaceaous, and a bit like those little soaps your grandmother used to have in the guest bath that you weren't allowed to actually touch, which I assume is the orange blossom mid and bottom notes.

I like it. I'm not sure it's Calli's scent, but hey.

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What have I been doing today...

Mon, 12 Jul 2021 01:53:43 GMT

...instead of anything I should be doing? (In other words, I have emails from several of you that I need to answer. If I don't reply by Wednesday, nudge me!)

If you haven't heard of Artbreeder, it's an AI-driven way of creating images by combining images and tweaking various things. It's sophisticated enough to use for character development and can be a hell of a lot of fun.

So I ended up seeing if I could produce Calli and Burn from Deadfall and Deadwater. I haven't gotten Calli yet, but I'm working on her. I've gotten very very close to Burn. He's still a little too good-looking but after I used Photoshop to scar him up and put a lot of sun damage on his face, I decided that I was fine with Hollywood-ugly instead of actually ugly and left it at that.

( Burn lurks behind this cut. Are you ready? )
I love the artlike look of it. I haven't been able to get Calli to be a more arty and less realistic version without it going really weird. So far I've gotten this:

( And now Calli-but-not-quite )
And now for some fun with Artbreeder's weird-ass random genes! Most especially, one very important gene called "Hat."

HAT.

( What does Burn look like with MORE HAT and with LESS HAT? )
So I now see why the humans of the past all wore hats almost all the time: hats prevent the Great Cosmic Horror from leaking through into our reality.

In conclusion: MOAR HAT

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Nifty tool

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 14:34:03 GMT

The OED Text Vizualiser. Drop 500 or fewer words written post-1750 into it, tell it the date of the writing, and it'll give you a graph (and a couple of spreadsheets) that shows you the general time of origin and language from which the word was inherited, borrowed, or formed (Germanic, English, Romance, Latin, etc.).

I dropped two sections of Deadwater (the thing I'm currently writing) into it, one from Burn's POV and one from Calli's, just to see what my language choices are for each voice.
( cut for screenshots )

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Adventures in research

Mon, 24 May 2021 21:10:36 GMT

Reading about cattle raiding in medieval Spain*, in the ONLY REFERENCE I CAN FIND TO THE SUBJECT IN ENGLISH.** Mostly because there's not much out there on the subject in English, but it's frustrating figuring that out because all the scholarship out there wants to talk about the transference of the Spanish ranching system to the New World.

OTOH, I can't think of many cattle-ranch-based medieval/Renaissance fantasies...(if you had access to and read the novella I posted under lock, Burn is from a vaguely Fantasy Spanish background.)

edit: I have found an awesome resource: The Library of Iberian Resources Online. It appears to have been last updated in 2006, but contains a lot of PDF of out-of-print books that I think may be useful...end edit

Also, I have been having difficulty coming up with a basic equivalent to "Mr/Mrs/Ms" in this society. I've got the Latin-flavored domna/domnus for lady/lord, but nothing I like is coming to mind for the non-aristocratic generic title. "Ser" appears to be the traditional version for the fantasy I've read but it's in EVERYTHING including Game of Thrones so I really don't want to do it. Argh.

* Short version: borders, arid landscapes, militarized cultures and a few more things contribute to the development of a raiding culture in various areas of the world, and Reconquista Spain is one of them, with lots of raiding taking place on the (variable) border between Moorish-held and Christian-held lands.

** Because someone will ask: McGlynn, Michael. "Ecology of a master motif: cattle raiding in late medieval Spain in light of cross-cultural evidence." Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. Mar2018, Vol. 19 Issue 1, p1-21. 21p.

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Art. Not mine. Of my stuff.

Sat, 12 Oct 2019 01:54:43 GMT

OK so I basically commissioned fanart of my Deadfall characters from 3 different people I found on Reddit to celebrate getting my rough draft done.

( Read more... )

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