Tough Guide to Fantasyland ... I've got it!

Just a short post of me congratulating myself on finally having a copy of The Tough Guide to Fantasyland in my hands. Here's hoping that none of my books qualify too closely. I'm also taking a look to see if there's anything in there that could be spun into something interesting. I mean, if 'guy gets shot to death' can be spun into thousands of wonderful crime novels (mm, I love crime ... gotta get back into reading fiction) then why can't fantasy tropes? Well, we'll see.

De-Toxing the Easy Way

Well, rather than succumb to one complicated diet or de-tox plan or another I decided to do something simple. My birthday weekend was a binge of energy drinks, snack foods, and the odd glass of alcohol so I figured I should probably do something to de-tox. So, preferring the simple way, and having noticed how 'meh' I've been feeling of late, I cut out the refined sugar.

Basically, no cordial, no chocolates, no cakes, no energy drinks, no lollies. This is my fifth day. My one failure was a yohurt-iced muesli bar so I'm doing pretty well. Especially since it was a Zombie Walk on Saturday that I went to that involved eating in the city for lunch (6-inch subway) and dinner (chicken burger at a yiros shop). Everyone else pretty much went to KFC so I think I did well. Later on, there was a close brush when the girl giving us a lift wanted to take us to a chocolate-based cafe where she was going to shout us food. Then we went to an On-The-Run petrol station where they picked up a very large cream-filled cake-thing for us all to share (me and my fiance resisted the urge).

This week, there has also either been a cake or biscuits in the lunch room at work every day of the week. Can you believe that? Normally I'm lucky if it happens once. This week it's every day! I've also been drinking 2 - 4 cups of water a day.

Funnily enough, other than massive cravings (destroyed by eating mangoes - they sure hit that sugar button) and a mild yet persistent headache on Day 2, I've felt better than before. While my poor sleeping habits ensure I'm sleepy each morning and I still laze in bed for 20 minutes post-alarm (don't worry, I set my alarm expecting that), that's still a 50% reduction in lazing-in time AND when I finally do get up I feel awake. I'm not even nodding off at my desk come 3.00PM like I used to.

So it appears to be working ... the trouble is that this isn't the intense de-tox that makes your body fit and fighting and ready for another onslaught. This is the sort of subtle de-tox that only really provides long-term benefits as part of a life-style change.

Gee, I'm glad it's fruit season in Australia because I sure have a sweet tooth!

Skilling Up Your Storytelling Skills

Well, we've all read up on how to improve your skills through reading how-to-write books and blogs, attending conferences, and interviewing writers. At least, odds are that if you're reading my blog, you have. I've also mentioned how you can improve your storytelling skills through general research, training and observation (such as going bush walking can improve your descriptive techniques as well as be inspirational).

Of course, there are other options. What about all those storytelling hobbies out there? What about sitting around a campfire and coming up with improvised horror stories? You can keep track of your skill by watching how a real live audience reacts to you. Doing theatre sports or acting classes can also assist by making you more aware of the role of body language amongst other things.

Also, why not try your hand at a pen-and-paper roleplaying game either as a player (where you create and control a single character complete with personality and goals) or as the Game Master / Storyteller / Dungeon Master (where you create and control the world, antagonists, and any character that isn't controlled by a player)? Sure, these games can be played as dice-rolling extravaganzas to the tune of 'lightning bolt' and 'magic missile' where the players simply use statistical number crunching to win against the enemy. Generally, however, they are played as excursions into other worlds, with players throwing themselves into the skins of their characters, and GMs developing story lines in an interactive universe. We all know what it's like when a protagonist in a novel has a mind of its own. What about having four that really do?

The benefits of doing this is that you can see first-hand which plot lines capture interest and which fall flat. A session of roleplay also generally covers more ground than a session of writing, which means that you can practice plotting on a faster level, and you certainly gain a lot of skills at description and dialogue. If your description is too long or your dialogue too unrealistic, you'll soon know about it. You can have games about solving crimes, exploring fantasy worlds (great to assist with your world building), dealing with horrible monsters, or hunting ghosts. Pretty much any type of genre has a market for it (except for Romance - that could just get plain weird between friends).

Also, it's a lot of fun and can give any budding writer the audience s/he craves. Just beware: No plot survives contact with players. A player's mind doesn't function the ways that ours does and they will always come up with some unexpected route to solve an obstacle.

Nanowrimo Plan

Well, I've been knocking my head against the brick wall that is editing The Butterfly Lady and reached a crisis point of: This book is so OMG boring I just can't stand reading it another second all I see is issues bwahhh! So I'm thinking I may have over-edited it. I may have over-read it. I may, in short, after six months, need to take a step back, have a sit down, draw a few deep breaths, and GO DO SOMETHING ELSE FOR A CHANGE.

So I've figured I'll throw my hat into the Nanowrimo ring. I'll do a bit more editing/writing to get the novel to the new ending that I think it needs and I'll take October to do that. Then in November I'm going to totally take a look around and start seeing other novels.

I'm currently tossing up between:

An Inquirer (think police detective meets KGB) in a fantasy-land city starts investigating a simple homicide and ends up caught between a war between two Noble Houses.

and...

A Librarian whose role it is to gather, remember, and teach information in the largely illiterate lands of the Ihlander Salt Plains (think post-apocalyptic fantasy land) tries to keep peace between warring tribes of orcs, deal with raiders, and discover why a mysterious oasis has re-appeared and what happened to its original inhabitants.

So ... Fantasyland Conspiracy plot or Fantasyland Post-Apocalyptic Mystery.

Hmm... Any thoughts? And is anyone else doing Nanowrimo?

Good Books, Pretty Books, Pretty Pretty Books

Yay! Went into the library and found Beyond the Shadows (Brent Weeks) and Dancing on the Head of a Pin (Thomas E. Sniegoski). I've read the first book in the Brent Weeks trilogy. The later just has a really awesome cover and blurb. Either way, I'm excited. Now all I need to do is get a hold of Dragon Haven by Robin Hobb (I'm halfway through it but had to return it because someone else had it booked) and I'll be in for a very happy week of bussing. Anyone else reading any very good books?

Law Enforcement

In my country, we have the law separated into the Legislative (law and policy makers), Executive (police officers, government officials, and other such people who enforce the law), and the Judiciary (those who judge breaches of the law and decide punishments). In the Realms, the government is split into the Legislative/Executive and the Executive/Judiciary. Basically, the ruling class (consisting of members of the five Noble Houses who have sorceress lineage) are both administrators and law-makers.

The Law Enforcement side of it combines the Executive and the Judiciary. It's split into two levels. You have the Watchmen who wander the streets, keep an eye and ear to the ground, and are basically city guard who promote law and order on the streets. Then, separate to these people, are the Inquirers and Auditors (derogatively referred to as 'Grey Coats'), who investigate crimes ranging from murder to sabotage to conspiracies to treason (depending on their rank / designation). The Inquirers and Auditors are two sides of the Department of Justice. Basically, Inquirers investigate most crimes and Auditors oversee their duties and fulfill the role of judge of crimes brought before them (as well as investigating certain high-profile fraud, treason, and other such cases).

Yeah, there's room for bias there, which the Audorian Queen has attempted to deal with by creating special schools for the Department of Justice. When likely candidates are identified from the school children they are transferred to that school and their parents paid a certain yearly amount called an honorarium. Since the year 23, schooling has been mandatory for children below the age of 14 in any area with a local school - hence why apprenticeships are illegal for anyone below the age of 14 - so there's an increasing pool of candidates. Nobles are barred from entry in the Department of Justice to keep them free of corruption. The schools are basically brainwashing academies that turn children into analytical officers of the Realms. Corrupt officials in the Department of Justice are all charged with treason, by the way, and their names become mud.

Sounds cool, huh? When I'm done editing The Butterfly Lady I'm going to write a novel from the point of view of one such Inquirer in the service of the Realms.

So, have you decided what your country's Law Enforcement Agencies look like?

Thank You To My ADHD

I know this is going to seem like a strange blog post but I feel moved to post it anyway. A few years ago, my mother told me that I was once diagnosed with ADHD. Now it caused me trouble as a kid (though I didn't know I had it) as I was a motor mouth with no sense of time (or direction, but that's another story) and I was so busy thinking a million-miles-an-hour that I found it hard to make friends as I spent too much time thinking about what I would say next. I once had to stick a post-it note in high school to my forehead to remember that mum had put a bottle of Coke in the freeze to quick-cool it and I had to get it out after an hour.

Very forgetful.

Fast forward and almost every one of my skills are due to learning to cope with what others might label a disorder. I'm sure I got off lightly. I don't believe my ADHD was very severe so I don't blame anyone who found only trouble from it and I'm certainly not saying that I'm awesome for being able to learn to cope with ADHD.

What I'm saying is that my ADHD was awesome for me. My thoughts fluttering a million miles an hour taught me how to let my thoughts soar. My low boredom threshold taught me to daydream constantly in any dull moment or analyse the surroundings or jot down notes for novels or think about all the things I had to remember to do and what order to do them in and how best to get them done. I learned to cope with my scatterbrained nature by doing up lists which show me what I've done and what I've yet to do and where my planning fell down and where it can be improved.

I've also learned to pay more attention to other people. Sometime I find it hard to stay 'in' the conversation but I do put a lot of thought in and around conversational times about what someone said and how they said it and how they reacted. I've become a lot more conscious of how I present myself and my words. My psychology degree mixed with my ADHD-fueled analytical time mixed with my novel-writing / role-playing / improvised theatre mind to help me figure out how other people interacted and why and how best to approach people. It also helped me to sit back during my daydream-times and take some perspective and think about personal philosophies like:

Never make a promise you can't keep.

Never offer something you aren't willing to give.

Never get caught up in an argument (as opposed to healthy debate) if you can help it. Antagonism benefits nobody.

Since I can't turn my mind off, I can't simply pretend that social gaffes didn't happen. I sit there and I think about it and I figure out how to do it better. I think about who I've seen that did it successfully. I think about what I could do or should do. And when I'm not thinking, daydreaming, or analysing, I'm reading and that opens my mind to further viewpoints and perspectives, both in non-fiction and fiction.

My ADHD has also given me the need to swap between tasks to keep my mind refreshed and on-task and while I'm not a great multi-tasker (I'm not great at doing multiple things at once), I am pretty good at task-swapping successfully and this often cuts down on procrastination and the slow-down that often comes from keeping with the same task for too long.

So yes, thank you to my ADHD. You have provided me with the energy to think, the drive to spend my time doing / thinking, and the need to find ways to regulate my time to keep myself on track - skills that have led me to becoming the imaginative, analytical, efficient, and inventive person I am today.

I am who I am and I am happy with that.

My Measures of Time

Well, I've been asked to elaborate on my date system so I thought I might as well do it here in case anyone else is interested. Basically, Year 0 is the Year of the Magocratic Revolution when the sorcerors who had been banished 22 years before hand from Audor Towers (the only place sorcerers were allowed - and even then it was a small, dinky island) drew together the merchant class, naval class, monster hunters, and even an aristocratic turn-coat family to overthrow the old ruling class.

On an aside, there were many reasons behind the revolution: the merchants and bankers were often richer than the nobility but there was little upward mobility and debts on the nobility were sometimes forgiven by the King; vital technology like the printing press was repressed despite its use in surrounding countries due to fears of the peasant-folk getting uppity and that made them a backwater nation with increasing fears of invasion; the nobility were keen to spend freely on themselves but public works were neglected; the serf system was horribly out-dated compared to more progressive surrounding societies; charismatic sorcerers can do a lot with a few enchantments; and an idealistic vision whereby those blessed by the Gods to wield magic could protect the common man (what better divine mandate can you get!).

The country considered itself reborn at the Year of the Revolution. To denote time, years since the revolution are dated with a simple number, i.e. 92, while years prior to the revelation are depicted with a '-' sign, i.e. -92 would be 92 years before the revolution. I just wanted something a little different from using initials to denote passage of time or the other habit of simply having time go forward from some unknown start point (though that might be interesting in a fantasy society living in 9203 because that's how long the civilization has existed). So yes, woo! My dating system.

As for other areas of time, my world has clocks in it so that makes judging time by minutes and seconds easier though I need to reduce the usage of that in nautical and very rustic areas (that probably judge time by bells). The clockwork mechanisms are getting highly refined due to technology imported from Chiang Khang and thus you can get grandfather clocks. Still haven't decided on whether they have pocket watches. I'll need to research that one's timeline and then consider whether I want that to be invented during the course of my various books set in that world.

Linktacular!

Adverbs could be signalling much more. They could be little red flags that here's a chance for you to develop your characters / scenes more so instead of just pressing the delete key, look at them as a reminder to deepen the scene. TheOtherSideOfTheStory explains!

A quote from a fun blog: Sometimes you just got to tell the reader something to get it across. But when you are forced to, do it with humor :"Rev. Smug was never a man to let his religion get in the way of his love life." So true. Go to Writing In the Crosshairs to find out more.

Methods of developing unpredictable storylines, surprising your reader, and a bunch of questions to help you do so can be found at TheOtherSideOfTheStory while another article at that same place will tell you about how to find the action and up the stakes in your novel.

Flights of Fantasy have a post on Swords in Fantasy. Many different types of swords are described, from sentient ones, to ones with different powers, and how the post author just loves all these different uses for swords in fantasy. It's an interesting and fun read.

TalkToYoUniverse have a post on details in fiction. This blog post contains one of those lines that really sums up what I've been trying to say with my posts on descriptions: ''confound the easy expectations and your world will start to pop." It's not only good because contrasts and contradictions catch the eye (try saying that one three times fast) but also because it makes the viewpoint character feel more real. I would notice the CEO's nose ring or chunky gemstone bracelet before I notice his Armani suit, after all. In a public library, I would notice the Warhammer 40k terrain set up in the Youth section (complete with a number of Warhammer 40k books in center stage) before I would notice the other book shelves. Therefore it makes more sense when the character does, too.

A few more useful links from TheOtherSideOfTheStory (a blog which I heart more and more and which is increasingly convincing me to hunt down the Shifters trilogy that she has written) involve how to strengthen POV through description (an area critters always bug me about), describing movement through sound alone (very cool way of looking at it), describing emotion within the POV (to help the readers feel inside the character's head - another issue of mine), and a post on describing what the reader's don't assume.

Message From My Ideal Reader

As my targeted audience is, well, really it's me. Yep, I'm egotistical to write a novel based on me as the most marvellous audience of all! So I figured that I, as a reader, should write a message to me, as a writer, so that I can figure out just what I want in a novel. I'd suggest you all do the same (and if you do, link me to your blog post through the Comments section).

"What do I want? I want the world. Your world. I want to explore its strange lands and see places I've never visited before - whether that's a New York urinal or a mystical glen. I don't just want to read a word that says I'm there. I want to feel like I've been there, like a tourist who can recount the wonders they've seen, and that means I need to see, hear, and, hell, smell that urinal or mystical glen. I want you to make me think and feel.

I want you to stretch my understanding and help me see the world from a different perspective. Not constantly. That would make my brain hurt. But once or twice in ways that fit with the mentality of the host body I'm riding (also known as the protagonist).

I demand some dose of the strange in the books I read, whether this be an assumption turned on its head (a really cantankerous witness to a homicide telling off the police about how they trampled his hydrangeas rather than a timid or helpful witness) or bizarre sub-dimensions and hell-pockets that barely match our reality. I don't want too much strangeness, though, not outside of a short story. Hell-pockets are all well and good but they're better if they imitate the familiar but just don't quite make it.

Mostly, I want to play the voyeur in an unfamiliar place. I want to root about in someone else's dirty laundry (lots of neat gossipable secrets and issues between characters, please), see what their homes look like, find out what they think about people, and see what certain situations (natural disasters, wars, divorces) are like without having to go through them (and yet somehow feeling like I almost did). I also like seeing someone else being dragged through the mud of tragedy but ultimately I'd like some hope with my horror, thanks."

So that's me. Guess I haven't really simplified things for myself, have I?

Damned demanding Ideal Reader!