The Quest

 I was talking with misaditas earlier this morning about what I’m writing these days.  “A bit of this, a bit of that,” I told her.  “I keep trying to tackle Homecoming, the SF novel, but I just don’t know … maybe I should finish up SmallSighT, the Thorne’s Quest prequel.  I just don’t know…”  So articulate of me, don’t you think? 

As we continued to discuss the matter — she had several good suggestions of possible strategies to try — I realized that I don’t believe I can pick what project I next give my heart and soul to.  It’s like hunting, I said to her.  When you go out into the woods, you can’t thrash around wildly or charge off in every direction at once.  You have to walk quietly.  Let the game think that you’re not dangerous.  Let them come to you.

After we stopped talked I continued to think about the matter.  Maybe it’s more like fishing.  Really, I know nothing about hunting, and in fact I’m philosophically opposed to it, unless what you’re pointing at the animal is a camera.    But I did do some fishing as a young’un.  The main thing is to be quiet.  You paddle your canoe to a likely spot, let down your line and then just … wait.

I think that’s what I’m doing these days.  I’ve paddled my writer’s canoe to a good spot.  I talk to lots of writers every day.  I read interesting material, both fiction and non-fiction.  I try to soak up the world around me, with special attention to what various experiences feel like.  I people-watch like mad.  If you catch me staring at you, it’s probably because I’m pondering whether one of your mannerisms would fit for a fictional character.

I’ve also let down my line.  It’s a long line, to reach the deep waters.  I don’t mind the little fish of short stories, and I have caught a few of those in the past few months, but I’m hoping to hook another big one like Thorne’s Quest.

So now I’m waiting.  Just sitting in my canoe and being.  Kinda comfortable, actually.  The sun’s warm, but I’m in a shady spot where the fish may come.  I can hear loons in the distance.  Wake me when it’s time for lunch; maybe I’ll dream an interesting novel idea…

I’ll tell you right now, I’m disappointed.  After all the hoopla, the Global Language Monitor determined that the term “web 2.0″ was the English language’s one millionth word. According to the GLM,

Web 2.0 is a technical term meaning the next generation of World Wide Web products and services. It has crossed from technical jargon into far wider circulation in the last six months.

I spend a lot of time on line and talking with people about computers and such, and I have never heard anyone except GLM itself use the term “web 2.0″.  I only have one further comment on the matter:

Not me, obviously, just the best “pout” I could find on Photobucket! 

According to the Toronto Star, the Global Language Monitor http://www.languagemonitor.com/ is predicting that the English language will hit the one million word mark sometime this month.  That means that we English-speakers will have 1,000,000 words to choose from each time we want to express a thought or a feeling.  Cool, eh?  The GLM did predict that we would hit this milestone in April, but their logarithms must have been malfunctioning, as they are now predicting it again, in June.  Here’s their latest prediction:

At the current pace of a new English-language word created about every 98 minutes, English will cross the Million Word Mark on June 10th, 2009 at 10:22 am (Stratford-on Avon Time).

The site also offers some possibilities for what word or expression is likely to be the millionth.  Among the contenders are octomom (mother of octuplets), cuddies (Hinglish for women’s underwear, which is making me chuckle about the name of the hospital administrator on the TV show House), e-vampire (an electronic device on standby which is still drawing current) and my personal favourite slow food (the opposite of fast food, ie, food you cook at home).

In the course of following links to read more about this phenomenon, I also discovered the Word Warriors of Wayne State University http://www.wordwarriors.wayne.edu/, whose goal is to “bring back great words”.  You can submit a word that you think should make a come-back.

I’m pondering whether I have any words to submit.  I like prevenient, but I don’t think it meets their criterion of once having been a word in common useage.  I also like kerfuffle, but I may have made that up.  Stravage is good, but I’m not sure that ever had useage outside of the Mary Poppins books.  Discombobulate is also an excellent word! 

Waiting breathlessly (as I’m sure you now are) to see what the 1,000,000th English word will be!

*flourish of horns*  Time for a Reader Survey!

The title of today’s post is, as you probably know, a quote from The Fellowship of the Rings.

I’d like to hear how you all feel about endings.  Broadly speaking, I think there are four kinds of novel/series endings. 

There is what we might call The Classic Happy Ending: all the main characters have resolved their conflicts and are now mated to their true loves, the big bad has definitely been defeated and the High King is back on the throne.  Most Disney stories and Shakespeare’s comedies fall into this category.

In The Complicated Happy Ending, things end on a good note, and the quest is mostly solved.  But there is something that’s not quite finished.  What will happen when the Big Bad’s kid brother grows up?  Will he come after the hero?  Or there is a tinge of sadness.  The Lord of the Rings is an example of this: Frodo saves everyone by his heroic journey, but he is so damaged by having borne the Ring for so long that he must depart with the Elves; he cannot live in the land he saved.

Then there is The Sad or Tragic Ending: the quest or problem of the novel is resolved, but the hero dies or is somehow destroyed, usually by choices that she has made.  Hamlet (and all of Shakespeare’s tragedies) fall into this category.

Finally there is The Horror Ending: the characters think that things are solved, but the Big Bad has in fact not been destroyed.  The characters relax and celebrate, but the reader knows that the B.B. will rise up again and soon everyone will be suffering once more.  Think Alien, with the critter clinging to the outside of the space ship at the end of the movie.  *shudders*

So, either as a writer or as a reader, which one do you prefer?  Post your comments and I’ll edit this post with the tally.  If you’re a writer, you get 2 votes (one for what you like to write, and one for what you like to read).  If you’re a reader but not a writer, you get 1 vote.

I had writer’s block for about 35 years, before I started writing the Thorne’s Quest books 5 years ago.  A little while ago I figured out how much I might have written if I had just written 100 words each day of those 35 years.  The total?  1,277,500.  One million and two-hundred and seventy-seven thousand.  The equivalent of 5 very substantial novels. That’s assuming that on none of those days I got really rolling, as one does while writing, and was able to write more than 100 words.

Bit by bit.  That’s my motto.  No matter what else is happening, I try to write at least 100 words each day.  Doesn’t matter on what.  Drabbles, flashes, bits that will never be published, SF, Fantasy: as long as I write something, it’s good.

Every month, I make myself one of these:

Bit by bit.  I don’t plan on wasting another 35 years.

For Mother’s Day a few weeks ago, my husband and the offspring gave me Leonard Cohen’s 2-CD album, Leonard Cohen, Live in London.  You can read about it here: http://www.leonardcohen.com/  The album, that is, not our Mother’s Day celebrations.

Depending on what I’m writing, different music speaks to me.  I listened to a lot of Enya while I was writing Thorne’s Quest.  Right now, I’m working on various flashes and drabbles, most of them of the never-see-the-light-of-day variety, and I’m all about Leonard.

Leonard and I go way back, so far back that we’re on a first-name basis.  I was first exposed to him in high school English.  He’s a Canadian, you see, and his song Suzanne was considered a fine example of contemporary Canadian poetry.  It’s the first non-literal piece of writing that I recall appreciating. 

There are heroes in the seaweed
There are children in the morning
They are leaning out for love
And they will lean that way forever
While Suzanne holds the mirror.

I confess that I forgot about him for a while.  Then I rediscovered him in the early 80’s when the director of the counselling education program I was in played Famous Blue Raincoat at a weekend event.  “Wow,” I said, “Jennifer Warnes?  I’ve never heard of her.  But those lyrics are fantastic!”  The lyrics were Leonard’s, of course.

About five years ago, soon after I became disabled, I was casting around on TV late one night for something - anything - that would distract me from the truly cruel pain my body was subjecting me to.  And there was Leonard on PBS, singing his songs and looking incredibly cool and sexy in a small nightclub in somewhere unlikely like Texas.  He gave me an hour to focus on something other than my pain.  I fell in love with him again.

And here he is once more.  I could hold forth at length about Leonard’s lyrics.  I could tell younger readers who’ve never heard of Leonard that he wrote “Hallelujah” (you know, the one that KD Lang sings).  I could talk about “Like A Bird on a Wire” and the personal insights I’ve gained from one single line,

Like a baby, stillborn,
like a beast with his horn
I have torn everyone who reached out for me.

But the lyric that is catching me right now is from the first song on the new album, “Dance Me to the End of Love”. 

Dance me through the panic til I’m safely gathered in.

Thanks, Leonard.  That’s a good mantra for me right now.  I still love ya.

 I was at a conference for my former profession earlier in the week, and a fair number of people asked me how the writing was going.  It was fun to be able to report that I had finished the series.  “Oh?  It’s a trilogy?” people often asked.  *big grin*  “No,” I would reply.  “Eight books, actually.  About 2 million words, all told.”

The most common follow-up question was how on earth I had come up with a plot for an 8-book, 2 million word series.  I used to be rather inarticulate on that issue.  “Oh, I don’t know,” I would say vaguely.  Sometimes I can be the Queen of Self-Deprecation.  “It just … comes to me.”  These days, however, I hold forth at length about the principles of Organic Linear Plotting – trusting the plot to unfold before me as it ought to, letting characters have the space to grow as people, developing cultures that both resemble earth cultures and yet are unique.  All of which are fancy ways of saying “It just … comes to me.”

I’ve been re-reading C.J. Cherryh’s Foreigner sequence for the last few weeks.  This spring she published the tenth book in this wonderful series, and I am re-reading the 9 earlier books before I let myself tackle the new one.   If you don’t know this series, I heartily recommend it: a shipload of humans have had a navigating problem and end up so lost that they don’t even know which direction home is.  They can’t even find Sol in the night sky.  Think about that for a minute: think how far a star’s light shines.  They make Star Trek Voyager look like it got lost on the way to the corner store.   Anyway, these lost humans find a habitable planet and encounter another sentient species, the aveti, whereupon they nearly get wiped out because, although the atevi seem friendly, the hard-wired cultural differences are so vast that the humans constantly give offense.  I haven’t spoiled the plot for you with that info, by the way: that’s only the first chapter or so.  Of book one, Foreigner.  Did I mention that it’s a 10-book series?

I wonder if Cherryh has a better way of describing how she gets her wonderfully complex plots, cultures and characters?  Or maybe all her nifty explanations distill down to ”It just … comes to me” as well.

Well, in StringingWords’ usual synergistic fashion, “FantaMo”, which was going to be our writing contest for the month of June, has morphed into the Summer of Fantasy.  It will cover June, July and August.  The activities still aren’t clear.  But dontcha love the artwork that someone — either misaditas or eiie — developed for it?

Edit: According to eiie, the banner is “all misaditas”.

Over on StringingWords (the link is posted to your right, under “On-Line Community”), we do love our mo’s.  For the uninitiated, that’s short for “month”.  As in National Novel Writing Month (the original contest, in November), JanNo (the January contest) and FinTEDNo (Finish The *Expletive Deleted* Novel).  Yes, I know that last one isn’t, strictly speaking, a mo, but you get my point.

Anyway, in June we are planning to host FantaMo - Fantasy Month.  The plans are still developing, but it looks like we’ll focus on world-building, character development, the structure of the quest, and so on.

If you haven’t checked out StringingWords yet, I invite you to wander over and check us out.  Just a note, though: if it seems like there’s not much happening on the site, that’s because most of it is “user only”.

I found this pic on Photobucket while I was looking for a photo to use for the winners’ pips for CritMo on StringingWords. 

I apologize that I don’t know who created it; I forgot to note the poster’s username before I saved it to my own album.  Thank you, creative person, whoever you are!

For me, this pic captures an important element in the process of writing: all that imagining and pondering that occurs in my mind, about which no one has any idea unless I write about it.  At any given moment, there are 3 or 4 stories percolating in my mind.  There are characters having conversations, engaging in sword fights, romancing a new lover, struggling with the tedium of every day life, deciding whether to follow their destiny or hide under the bed . . .  Well, you get the idea.  I seem to have no control over what chooses to rise up out of my unconscious and present itself as a story idea; nearly anything can bubble up.

One of the things I did as I began to write Thorne’s Quest 5 years ago was to trust the product of my unconscious as it rose up and expressed itself in story ideas.  Some days I had no idea where the story was going, but I did know that my energy to write was high, so I just kept following, just kept describing what the shadow dancers were up to on the wall of my imagination.

These days, with no specific project that’s claiming my writerly attention, I am even more committed to this method.  Call it Organic Linear Plotting.  Call it free writing.  Whatever it is, it’s fun to simply watch the shadows of my mind dance their dances and to write about them.  I like to think that Jung would be pleased . . .