Category: Writing process

I worked full time while I studied for my undergraduate degree.  It was back in the early days of off-campus study, and a lot of my subjects were done partly off-campus, with big chunks of lab time during the holidays.

I did a science degree.  Applied science, which I confess I have never used. I started working in IT and I’ve spent most of my life working in IT.

The thing is, science has a lot of words that can be difficult to pronounce.

Some are easy. Trinitrotoluene and deoxyribonucleic acid are two I never had problems with.  I could see the roots of each word and it’s a simple matter of sounding them out.

Even so, to this day, I am still more of reader of science words, than I am a speaker.

It’s not just science words.  There’s a quote that goes around Twitter occasionally.  Never make fun of someone if they mispronounce a word, it means they learned it by reading.  That is so true.  I find that a lot with Latin words.  All my Latin has come from reading, not from hearing much of it spoken.

Take deus ex machina.  The literal translation is “god in the machine”.  This is from old Greek and Roman plays where the ‘machine’ was a crane held over the stage. There was a ‘god’ in the crane and he (presumably mostly a he) sorted out the plot.

It signifies a character who suddenly enters a story and provides a solution that couldn’t have happened otherwise.

When I was younger I always pronounced it ‘deuce ex ma-shee-na’.  It’s actually pronounced ‘day-yoos ex mack-inna’.  (That looks very Ocker written there, that’s how we’d say it with an Australian accent, anyway.)

The internet has been a boon.  Want to know how to pronounce deus ex machina.  Google it, with the word ‘pronounce’ at the end.

There’s only one problem, of course.  Not everyone pronounces the word the same way.  I used to pronounce carpe diem as ‘carp dee-em’.  Now I have a choice of ‘kar-pah dee-em’ or ‘kar-pay dee-em’. It probably doesn’t matter much, except to a purist Latin speaker, but either kar-pah or kay-pay has to be better than plain old carp.

Often when we write, we write to music.  Sound tracks mostly. Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, John Wiliams.  Sometimes we’ll do voices as well. Sarah Brightman, Enya, Era.

Occasionally, too, we listen to full soundtracks.  Particularly Whistle Down the Wind and Paris.

The problem with both of these is that that people speak in between the songs, which can be distracting.  But the music in between is fantastic.

Paris was written by Jon English and David MacKay. It’s brilliant, and I can’t remember which stories they were now, but at least one book, and part of two more, were written with John Parr singing his heart out as Paris in the background.

Sadly, it was never produced professionally, although we did see an amateur version of it here in Melbourne.

Jon English was part of my life growing up. First, as a touring rock star—he was one of the first rock stars I remember who toured our country town, and later when we were old enough to drive around the country chasing pub gigs, he was around too.

Later, on television, he was in shows like Against the Wind and All Together Now.

Even later still, when we started going to the theatre and he and Simon Gallaher put on their version of Pirates of Penzance.  I don’t know how many times we saw Pirates.  We loved it.  Absolutely loved it.

The timing, and the way the cast worked, together made this show awesome.  (And later the Mikado too, but always, especially the Pirates of Penzance.)

Every once in while you’d run into Jon English.  Mostly at gigs.  He was always approachable, ready to say a few words.

RIP Jon.  You were a talented musician and an accomplished actor.  And from what we saw of you, you were also a nice guy.

Kudos to S. L. Huang and everyone involved in the massive effort to get Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell Eligible Authors together.

Job well done, and in a very short time.

If you’re going to vote for the Campbell award this year, this is the place to start.

In honour of C. J. Cherryh being chosen as the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA, Inc.) 32nd Damon Knight Grand Master, here’s a quick quiz.

Who is the character, and from which book?

I am drawn into a team testing prototype ships that travel at a significant percentage of the speed of light

I am stamped on the forehead by an alien as a message to tell humans to keep their hands off

I am a clone

 

I am the human representative to an alien race

 

I am the captain of my ship. I rescue a hairless alien and find he is intelligent

Books and creativity go hand-in-hand.  Here are three creative, book-related things I came across on the internet this week.

Book trailer

Book trailers don’t normally work for me. I can appreciate a well-done book trailer as a short film, but they don’t normally make me want to read a book. This one did.

Which isn’t bad, because I have to say, I’m not fussed about the Titanic. Sure, I’ve seen that movie, and bought the soundtrack. I also bought Robin & RJ Gibb’s Titanic Requiem, but that’s about my limit.

Fiction to fashion

I love it when a book or a movie makes such an impression that people take part of that book out into real life. Fan art. Fan fiction. Cosplay. Fashion and jewellery.

Over at Fiction to Fashion, J and A (Julie, but I don’t know A’s name), take books and design outfits based around the book.

Here’s the video for Illuminae, by Amie Kaufmann and Jay Kristoff.

Or take a look at their outfit based around Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona.

They’ve outfits for Ready Player One (Ernest Kline), Shadow and Bone (Leigh Bardugo), and Steelheart (Brandon Sanderson).

Novels and nail polish

Or what about nail polish based on books?

Check out Novels and Nailpolish.  Here’s one’s for Rainbow Rowell’s Fangirl.

 

 

 

 

And one from Nite Lite Book Reviews. I probably don’t even need to name this one, but it’s Redshirts, by John Scalzi.

It must be close to book release time.  Tor.com are giving away both Alliance AND Linesman.  Pop over to Tor.com and leave a comment for your chance to win.

 

Teeth are part of your skeleton.  They’re the only part of your skeleton that you actually clean.

Sherylyn went to the dentist the other day and had her teeth cleaned. She said she could feel the vibration of it all the way through her body. It gave her a massive headache, so bad she went to bed for rest of the day in an effort to stave off a migraine.

If you’ve read LINESMAN, you’ll understand that the way she described it later made it sound like a cross between a pneumatic drill and that bit in LINESMAN where Michelle puts her head down and says, “My bones hurt.”

Next day, Sherylyn thought she was better, so off she went to work. But the headache, plus the glare from the computer screen and the concentrated heat/light coming in the window, all combined to bring the migraine on.

Splat, down she went.

Those of you who’ve had migraines, or know people who’ve had migraines, know just how bad that can be. She’s recovered now, but … all from the vibrations of having her teeth cleaned.

The human body is amazing.

In unrelated news

Watch out for more giveaways. After all, we have a new book coming out in nine days.

We’re going through a building boom here in Melbourne, Australia.  Particularly in our little corner of suburbia, where the building regulations were recently changed, only months after a council heritage listing was overturned.

Now, instead of being a post-World War 2 streetscape of single-story houses on quarter acre blocks, we can build up to three houses on the block, and in our particular street we can build up to three storeys high. On streets nearby that goes up to six storeys.

As you can imagine, there are cranes popping up everywhere.  Every time you walk around the neighbourhood it seems another yellow planning permit notice has gone up.

In the City of Melbourne itself—especially around the docklands—high-rise office buildings and apartment housing are going up at the same rate. Or being pulled down. [No parks or open spaces, sadly. 🙁 ]

In a recession, building stops almost altogether for a while.  But there’s usually some building going on. Or demolition.

Which begs the question.  Why aren’t science fiction and fantasy worlds full of building sites?

When a world is wealthy, it builds. When a world is undergoing expansion, it builds.

In space, we have some massive cities, but no-one’s building them. They’re always there, fully formed.

The rich live in modern, state-of-the-art multi-storey towers. The poor live in buildings that are condemned.  But there’s not a building site in sight, and rarely a mention of one.

Thus, in the interests of adding reality, we added building construction to the world we created in Alliance (book two of Linesman).

Haladea III—formerly an agrarian world—has become the capital of the newly-formed New Alliance of governments. Seventy governments and their support staff have set up there, along with a combined military fleet.

They’re building. Boy are they building.  The infrastructure is stretched. The richest woman on world is Trenery “We dispose of your disposals” King, who’s raking in the credits managing waste.  New buildings are going up daily, old ones being torn down. The planet is one massive building site.

So we wrote it all in, even integrating some of the construction into the story.

When we’d finished we sent it off to our agent, to get her feedback.

She came back with:

“Too many mentions of all the construction on New Haladea.  Cut by 50% or more.”

So we cut, and you’ll find she was right, because there’s still a lot of construction in the novel.

This has been a big year in books for us, because our own first book, Linesman, was published this year.  Our second (Alliance) was edited and will be out in February 2016; and we’ve almost finished writing the third.  As a result, neither of us read as much as we’d like to, because we were writing.

Still, here are some of the stories we enjoyed, or that came to our attention, this year.

Favourite book

Even though we write together and enjoy many similar books, we don’t always have the same favourites.  I (Karen) tend to enjoy the harder science fiction and ideas in the stories, while for Sherylyn it’s all about the character.

      Sherylyn loved Anne Bishop’s Vision in Silver. She loves all of the books in The Others series, and is waiting impatiently for Marked in Flesh. I like The Others too, but so far I have only read Written in Red.

I don’t know that I had a favourite book this year. I was hanging out for Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Mercy. I only read it on the 31 December, and enjoyed it, but haven’t really decided if it was my best book of the year yet.

Favourite character

Sherylyn opts for Meg, from Vision in Silver.  I like Translator Zeiat from Ancillary Mercy (although Sherylyn found her irritating).  I was also quite partial to Captain, from Sorceror of the Wildeeps.

 

 

 

Best cover

Fool’s Quest, even though we haven’t read it, yet. We’ve got the Jackie Morris covers, and it’s fascinating to see the evolution from drawing to cover on Jackie’s site.

 

Best creature

The Fog (nanobots) from Joel Ross’s The Fog Diver.

What can you say about thinking bots that deem humans as dangerous?

Book we want to read but neither of us have got to yet

Fool’s Quest, book two of Robin Hobb’s Fitz and the Fool series.  This came out in August, and we’ve had it on the bookshelf ever since. We got it at a time when we were doing some heavy editing, so it kind of slipped our mind until now.

Other books we read and enjoyed

Sorceror of the Wildeeps, by Kai Ashanti Wilson.

I loved the premise of this book. But the ending. No way. It’s the first book in a long time that I’ve flat out decided didn’t end the way the author implied it did. I so wanted to rewrite the end.

 

 

Ash and Silver, Carol Berg

A good follow-up to the first book, Dust and Light.  Lucien had a bit more control of his life (sort of), which was nice.

 

 

The Mapmaker Chronicles, Alison Tait

I think we read all of these this year. It’s middle grade, about a race around the world, from the point-of-view of the mapmaker on one of the ships. Should appeal to anyone who enjoyed the John Flanagan Ranger’s Apprentice books.

Joel Ross’s The Fog Diver was another enjoyable book for the same age group.

Rachel Aaron Bach’s Paradox trilogy and her Nice Dragons books

We binge read through some of Rachel Aaron Bach’s books this year.

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That was our reading. Or some of it, anyway. How was yours?