He’s switching the the gender of the men and women in passages from various books. Robert Heinlen, Issac Asimov, Piers Anthony, Neal Stevenson and his own Libriomancer.
Interesting stuff.
Those of you who have been reading this blog a while might recall that we initially wrote Crown Princess Michelle, from the Linesman series, as a male. Early on, our agent suggested she would be stronger as a female. She was so right, and we cannot imagine Michelle as anything but a woman now.
There’s another book, a fantasy, we wrote a while back, where our agent did the same. “Have you considered making Edmund female?”
We’ve put this book aside. It’s fantasy, for a start, and right now we don’t have time to write any fantasy, we’re enjoying the science fiction. It also needs a lot of work. (Another suggestion was that we could turn it into a science fiction. That’s a lot more plausible, actually, because that would open the story massively for us. The world building would make a lot more sense.)
Edmund’s the main character in the book. We’re resisting. But then, I resisted changing Michelle at first. We do refer to the story as Edmunda now. So maybe we’re psyching ourselves into it.
Just for interest, here’s a gender-swapped passage from Edmunda. (This is an early draft, please excuse.)
It’s not that cold here in Melbourne, but sometimes it feels like it. I can’t recall how many years ago it has snowed in Melbourne. It’s rare that it does, and the snow melts quickly.
We received the copy edits for Confluence on Friday. 3,397 revisions. It sounds bad, but we’re getting better. A good half of those seem to be comma-related. Add commas, remove commas. You’d think we’d know them by now, wouldn’t you? There are a few places we had hyphens where our copy editor took them out, and vice versa. (I nearly put a hyphen in there, but looked it up. It doesn’t need one.)
Around 3,000 of the changes are doubles. For example, add a comma, the whole word gets deleted and a new word with a comma is added. So there are technically under 2,000 changes all up.
Meantime, it’s freezing here in Melbourne. (Freezing for us is getting down to single digits Celsius. Not cold by many people’s standards, but it is by ours.) I confess to staying inside a lot. Reading lots of books.
My long woollen coat has been getting a lot of wear. Last year I wore it around ten days in total.
I’ve been on reading binge, catching up on things I haven’t had time to read while we’ve been writing.
I’ve churned through a lot of series books. Interestingly, I have noticed that I have no trouble reading books one and two in a series, but the series has to really grab my attention for me to pick up book three.
(Chews fingernails, for Confluence is book three.)
I have friends who don’t like to read a series until the series is finished because they want to read them all at the same time. Yet, if I have to wait for a third book, with the break in between, I think I’m more likely to read it.
Or maybe we should just write duologies in future. 🙂
One of the more obscure movies Alan Rickman was in was a movie called Blow Dry. Not just Alan Rickman, either. It had Josh Hartnett, Natasha Richardson, Bill Nighy, Rachel Griffiths, Warren Clark and others.
It was a nice little comedy about a hairdressing competition. Funny in parts, moving in others. I still stop and watch it every time it comes up on the television.
I almost didn’t watch it at all because of the title. I mean. Blow Dry. What sort of movie does a name like Blow Dry evoke? Not one that I want to see.
Names are important.
Before we sold Linesman we’d heard so much about how writers had no control over the name the publisher chose for your book. Linesman was the working title, and it stayed the title all the way through. I don’t even remember anyone suggesting anything different.
The working title for Alliance was Kari Wang. We couldn’t think if anything that suited it, and by now we knew we wanted one-word titles for all the Linesman series books. I can’t recall now if we sent it away with that name, or if we changed it just before we sent it away to Linesman#2. We were asked if we had any ideas for names. We suggested a few, but it was someone at the publishing house who suggested Alliance.
The working title for Confluence was also named for the secondary point-of-view character. Again the publishing house asked for some suggested names. We supplied a list of six. One of those was Confluence.
Right now, we’re thinking about names for the next book we are working on. I’m not even going to name the working title, because it (and I quote)
Sounds too much like a women’s fiction novel about hairdressers and manicurists set in the 1950s.
Maybe that’s what made me think of Blow Dry in the first place.
This is just a quick update. We haven’t given a progress report for a while.
Alliance, book two of the Linesman series, has been out in the wild since late February. It’s been well received so far
Linesman has gone back for reprints, which is nice
Confluence, book three of the Linesman series, has been accepted for publication*. We’re expecting copy edits back in a month
We got the final artwork for Confluence early last month, so we’ve been spreading the cover picture around a bit
This means we’ve finished the trilogy we were contracted to do. We don’t know what happens next. That’s with our agent.
Until that decision we’re happily writing a new story about [can’t tell, spoilers]. It’s space opera. Lots of action. A little bit of fun [we hope]. Characters we love.
We’ll see.
* You get three payments for a book. The first is on signing, the last is on publication, and the middle one is what they call delivery and acceptance. This means your editor has finished with any edits she wants for the book and deems it ready to pass on for publication. There’s another round of edits after that, copy edits, where the copy editor checks spelling and grammar, and whether what you wrote works in with the earlier books.
You’re sitting on the train, listening to the phone conversation of the girl next to you. (You’re not trying to listen, but it’s that level where you can’t tune it out, and you don’t have a pair of noise cancelling headphones with you. In fact, half the carriage is listening for that very same reason.)
She’s having boyfriend trouble.
“I think he wants to drop me. It’s our anniversary in three weeks. I found this lovely restaurant. But he says he can’t afford it. It’s an excuse. He doesn’t want to go out.”
Noises from the other end of the phone.
“No. He’s like that all the time. And it’s not as if he can’t afford it. We’re going to this expensive steakhouse tonight.”
More noises from the other end of the phone.
“He knows I’m vegetarian. He’s apologetic and all that, but it’s his father’s fiftieth birthday and his dad likes steak. So we’re going to this place tonight—fifty dollars a steak, where I can’t eat anything—and then he says he can’t afford to take us anywhere nice on our anniversary.”
A short reply from the other end of the phone.
“No. It’s just an excuse. He’s looking for an excuse to make me drop him. He’s too cowardly to do it himself.”
You want to lean over and say to her, “Maybe he really can’t afford it.” Half the train probably does too. But this girl wouldn’t believe you, because she’s convinced the boyfriend is looking for an excuse to drop her.
She’s an unreliable narrator, as far as her boyfriend is concerned, because she’s interpreting everything he says and does in a specific way, which is not necessarily how most people would see it. And because she’s interpreting it that way, you, the reader—or in this case the listener—get a very specific idea about this girl and her boyfriend.
What impression do you have of the boyfriend?
He gets on well with his family. He’s careful with his money, although he is prepared to overspend for an occasion. The occasion he’s prepared to overspend for is his father’s birthday, not his girlfriend. So, not sure yet about the relationship with the girlfriend. Maybe she is right that he wants out. Even so, he comes across as a nice, family-oriented guy.
The girlfriend?
She comes across as somewhat selfish, thinking more about herself than her guy. Thoughtless about finance. Unappreciative of a man who puts family first. Whether she’s correct or not about the boyfriend trying to get her to dump him? Don’t know. Don’t suspect so, but that is more a gut reaction to the character than a reasoned is he or isn’t he.
This is a great writing technique. Using a scene/conversation to convey something else entirely. It gives extra layers to your story, making it richer.
In another example, take the film-clip, above. Mr Bean and the two-way mirror. How you perceive this scene totally depends on whose point-of-view you are watching.
As they say in science, it’s all relative to your frame of reference.
I’ve been reading if We Wrote Men Like We Write Women and If We Wrote Men Like We Write Women Part II over at Jim C. Hines’ site.