S. K. Dunstall

The current story we are writing is set in the southern hemisphere. It wasn’t a conscious decision, it just turned out that way as the novel progressed. That’s fine by me. I know all about living south of the equator and as a result it’s easier to write some of the world-building components.

Today I was writing about the weather, and one of the characters says to another, “That wind is straight from the south. I think it’ll snow.”

That’s going to jar some of our northern-hemisphere readers out of the story. After all, for those of you who live north of the equator, I expect that a south wind is a hot wind, much like our north wind is here. If we haven’t done our world-building well enough some readers will say, “This author has no idea,” and become a little less involved in the story.

No matter how hard an author tries, things the reader is unfamiliar with always have the potential to drag a reader out of the story.

One of these, for me, is the word ‘mom’.

Here in Australia our general form of address is Mum and Dad, so when I come across Mom there’s always this jarring moment where reality intrudes and takes me out of the book and plonks me right back into twenty-first century North America. I’m sure, likewise, Americans (and some Canadians) have a similar reaction to ‘mum’.

That’s why, in our stories, unless we’re trying for a particularly Australian tone (here’s looking at you, Danny and Gibbo) we’ll often try for different terms for parents. In this current book it’s Ma and Da, but you have to be careful with what you use. Ma and Da give the book what I’d call an almost peasant feel. Which works in this case because the story has a rural setting, but Ma and Pa aren’t exactly elegant, are they. What do rich people call their parents? Mother and Father? Mama and Papa? The problem is that naming parents is something everyone (or almost everyone) does. As a result it comes with a lot of preconceived stereotypes. Calling someone ‘mother’ conveys a different relationship that calling them Mom or Mum. A more formal one, and probably one from a family with more money. Mama (or Maman) and Papa are exotic and slightly foreign, and so on. At least, to this reader they are.

Chortle: to laugh in a noisy, gleeful way (verb); a noisy, gleeful laugh (noun).

OED

I’ve no idea which story the word came from, but all my characters are chortling at the moment.

I have two characters, known to their friends as the twins, not because they are twins but because they’ve been brought up together and are as close as many siblings. You know the types, they end each other’s sentences, seem to read each other’s minds. And in this case, they chortle a lot.

Yesterday, I got an idea for a new story.

What I normally do when I get a story idea is open a new blank document, write until I have the idea down on paper—or in electronic form in this case—save it to the ideas folder, and then go back to the current story I am writing. These ideas can run anything from half a page to thirty pages, but they’re usually somewhere between two and ten pages long.

Those ideas are the basis for future stories.

I finish up the idea and reread it before I go back to the story I am writing.

What’s this? This character chortles, too. Not once but twice, in two pages of story. Oh no.

Sadly, I’m a bit of a word chameleon when it comes to writing. Some might even call it a word thief. I’ll read a story, pick up on a word out of that story, and start using it. I remember back when I was reading Robin Hobb’s Fitz series one of my characters started smiling wolfishly. The first three books, when Nightshade was still around. I really struggled to not use the word. In the end Sherylyn put it on her weasel words list and edited it out in the second draft.

I suspect that’s what will happen here, too.

Weasel words are words that add nothing to a sentence. For example, if I wrote ‘weasel words are generally words that add nothing useful to a sentence’ there’s a couple of weasel words in there. Words like ‘generally’ and phrases like ‘some people say’ or ‘in my opinion’.

Our word list has expanded to be more than just this type of writing. It includes the ‘wrylies’ (‘he said, wryly’) and pet words (like ‘chortle’). I suppose, technically, it’s more of a watch-word list. (And yes, I deliberately weaselled there.)

Enough said. I’m going back to my chortling twins.

A trend I have noticed is authors using use the transitive form of a verb rather than the intransitive for past tense. (A bit hazy on my grammar here, so if I have my transitives and intransitives wrong, apologies.)

For example, the author might say:

“The light shined on the sword.”

Where I would write:

“The light shone on the sword.”

It’s not just shined/shone.  Instead of “I woke early,” the protagonist says, “I waked early.”  Instead of “I hung the washing on the line,” the protagonist says, “I hanged the washing on the line.”

I googled it and shined seems to be a common US usage, but I can’t remember coming across it in books before.

I’m noticing this more in stories on Kindle Unlimited.  I don’t know if this trend is specific to self-publishing, whether it’s relatively new usage, or whether it’s just one of the differences between US and British usage and I haven’t noticed it before.

Which usage do you use?

We happened to be in Sydney this year while Vivid was on. This is a festival of lights (and other things, like food). This year it runs from 26 May to 17 June 2023.

I’ve always wanted to see it, so this year we stayed an extra day in Sydney so we could.

The lights are amazing. It’s well worth seeing at least the once. Very crowded, as you’d expect, but the lights were amazing.

As you know, we love cruising, and we’ve finally managed to cruise after all the years of not doing so as a result of covid.

First, a poll. (Excuse the format, it’s so long since I had to do anything in WordPress except post that I haven’t yet worked out how to change the font.)

Do you capitalise covid? My logic is that when you’re specifically naming the novel coronavirus disease that started in 2019 then it’s COVID-19 (because COVID is an acronym) but in general it’s okay to refer to it non-capitalised. i.e. covid, even though technically it’s sloppy and one should refer to it as coronavirus. I think of it like flu. Lots of people shorten influenza to flu.

I suspect many people will disagree with me. Which spelling do you use?

Anyway, post-covid cruising has definitely changed, at least on the two cruise lines we have been on.

If you’ve never been cruising before, I always imagine that an equivalent would be those old-fashioned holiday camps. (A “Nobody puts baby in the corner,” type resort.) In some ways it sounds awful, but there’s a magic about being on the water that I absolutely love. I mean, look at the view (above).

There were less staff, resulting in reduced service. The internet queue, for example, was still an hour-plus long three days into the cruise because there was only one person sorting out issues.

There were less activities. On one ship practically the only daytime activities the ship ran were trivia quizzes. Now, I do love trivia, but five, six times a day? Especially when the only alternative appeared to be bingo.

Most of all though were the extra costs creeping into everything. Want to do an aerobics class? Pay for it. Want to go to a speciality restaurant? Pay standard a-la-carte prices for it. Worst of all, half the food in the supposedly ‘free’ restaurants cost money.

So, cost-cutting is a big thing.

Both cruise lines we went on were on the lower-priced end of the spectrum. We’ll try a mid-range cruise next, to see if the cost-cutting is as bad there.

Despite all that, despite internet issues, and despite my own self-introduced technical problems once the internet got sorted out, it was a great break and writing got done, even if no posts were posted.

We’re on holiday at the moment. I planned to post weekly, but miscalculated on internet availability.

I’ll sort something soon.

Meantime, above is the view from my current writing desk. It’s a balmy 27 degrees Celsius, and there’s a delightful small breeze.

Tough times.

The writing’s going well.

I didn’t get a chance to do an end-of-year review of books I read last year so I’m going to do one now. Three books I have read recently that I enjoyed.

The Golden Enclaves by Naomi Novik

Del Rey, 27 September 2022

This is book three in Novik’s Scholomance series.

I suspect I’m not the only one who, when they finished book two with Orion stuck back in the Scholomance and El on the outside immediately assumed that book three would be about what happened when El went back inside to rescue Orion.

This wasn’t that book at all.

This was more about what happened outside the school.

It’s lovely when a book throws your expectations so much but you still enjoy the story.

I don’t want to say too much because, spoilers, but if you read and enjoyed Scholomance and The Last Graduate, you should enjoy this one too.

The Weight of Command by Michael Mammay

Falstaff Books, 17 January 2023

All the top brass are wiped out, so lowly lieutenant Keira Markov is placed in charge of the army. She has to contend with attacks, politics and another lieutenant who thinks he should have gotten the job due to seniority.

Classic military sci-fi.

This one’s new, and it’s my favourite Mammay since the Planetside trilogy.

The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley

Bloomsbury Publishing. 26 July 2022.

This one’s a little more downbeat that the others, covering as it does topics like ethics, scientific experimentation, radiation coverups, the gulags, KGB purges (post-Stalin) with some flashbacks to the German eugenics program.

The story is set in 1963 in a town in Soviet Russia where Valery Kolkhanov is studying the effects of radiation on mice. Except, there’s a lot that’s hidden in this town.

It’s a genteel story, very Natasha Pulley, quite depressing and horrifying in places. It does have a happy ending, but first read around there were parts I had to skip. Not because they were bad, per se, but because of things I knew from history. For example, I skipped the flashbacks first time around as soon as I realised (long before Valery did) where his samples were coming from.

I’ve read a lot of LITRPG recently.  These are stories based on concepts introduced in role-playing games like Dungeons and Dragons, and on similar digital games such as Elder Scrolls and Final Fantasy.  They range from stories I would readily recommend to readers to some even I can’t finish. In these stories the protagonist usually completes tasks and levels up.

There’s a sub-genre of these stories where the protagonist is from Earth and transfers across to a new world. In a small but significant portion these (or otherwise I’ve just read a lot of them lately), the protagonist introduces this ‘amazing’ drink called coffee that all the locals instantly love.

Except … would they?

Particularly as the protagonist always seems to give the person who is trying the drink straight black coffee.  No sugar/honey, no milk/cream.

Yes, I can drink black coffee, and do on occasion when I’m desperate, and the coffee I drink most is is what we here in Australia call a long black—a shot of expresso with the rest of the cup filled with hot water—but I add milk to it.  Based on what I see around the coffeeshops, here in Australia only a small percentage of people drink straight black coffee by choice.

There’s the caffeine, of course, and that does help make one like the drink, but I’m not convinced that would override that first bitter taste.  For many people, coffee takes time to grow on you.

We’ve had a lot of people ask how our writing is going. Here’s where we’re at for the moment. (Note, this is a long introspective piece, with a lot of covid in it. I know some people are covided-out—I was for a while and would have screamed if I had to read one more covid article—so reader beware.)

Some people found the covid pandemic the perfect time to write. I’ve read lots of books that were written during the pandemic. Other writers struggled.

We, both of us, were amongst those who struggled, and we still haven’t got totally back into the writing groove yet.  We’ve spent a lot of time analysing why, and what happened, and trying to work out how we can get back into good writing habits (among other things, because it wasn’t just our writing that suffered). For those of you who, like us, struggled—with writing or anything else—here’s our story. Yours may be different but remember, you are not alone.

The pandemic started for us in early 2020. We came back from a cruise and effectively went into lockdown. It was easy enough for me, I already worked from home one day a week when I could, so it was business as usual except that all meeting were through Skype. Sherylyn’s setup took more time, as her office had to install a new phone system before she could log in. I worked nearly two full years from home, Sherylyn less, but we’ll explain that in a moment.

I have to say both of us working at home demonstrated two different management styles, and one was definitely better than the other. My boss was amazing, keeping in touch, ensuring I was coping and helping out in general. We started each day with a team chat, finished the week with virtual ‘drinks’ and games, and had other meetings in between, including a weekly one-on-one. In contrast, in the whole time Sherylyn worked from home they didn’t have a single team catchup that I recall and her boss may have spoken to her two or three times. You can imagine how isolating that was.

Working from home had some definite advantages. No commute. Yay. That was the best thing ever.

We saved a lot of money because we weren’t spending anywhere near as much. (Sadly, both of us lost have a year on commuter tickets, but let’s not go there.) And when you did have to go out the roads were a dream to drive on, with hardly any traffic.

But there were disadvantages, too, and many of these were writing-related. A lot of our writing was done on the commute or at lunchtime at work. Many, many years of doing this had ingrained writing habits. (They say if you want to write, develop writing habits, and believe me, it works. I could get on the train and start writing from where I had left off.) New stories tended to be written outside the house. What we did at home was the editing. It was hard to go from this to writing new stuff at the same desk I’d just spent the last eight or nine hours working at.

Workwise I had just started a big project that ran for the whole of 2020-21. Over time, work-creep started to happen. I used to finish at 5:30 pm. That crept up to 6pm, and then seven, and then eight and often later. Life became a cycle of work, grab a late dinner, go to bed, then get up and do it all again. Exercise? What’s that? (And to be fair, for me my knee was starting to give major problems by then, so I was cutting the exercise anyway.)

Writing became something we did intermittently because we were too exhausted to do it regularly.

At the time we were working on the novel we’d promised to deliver to Caitlin (our agent). This was a change of pace for us, a fantasy rather than science fiction. But as we stopped writing, the story stopped flowing. Normally we take around twelve months to write a complete book but two years on we were only three quarters of the way through the first draft. Worse, as our writing time reduced the quality of our writing deteriorated as well.

We were both heading for burnout, although it took a while to realise that. Sherylyn worked for twelve months before she resigned. I have to say, based on what I observed, I am surprised she lasted that long.

After she finished work, she had more time to write but by then I wasn’t writing as much and this dragged her down because while she could write, I couldn’t. She’d jump to do her bits asap, then had to wait on me to do my bit. This added pressure for my writing, on top of a heavily-pressured work environment.

Sherylyn finished the first draft of the fantasy, and one round of edits but by this time I was so sick of the story that I couldn’t even look at it. Generally, if we give a novel six months on the shelf we can come back to it with fresh eyes but I can’t even look at this one now and it’s been twelve months. There are parts of it I love, parts I know need work and the story has promise (at least we think so). But it’s on hold for the moment, until I can get over that hump.

My big work project finished early 2022. This coincided with the sale of the company I worked for. As part of the sale we shifted from being a company that designed and built its own software to one that purchased software from other companies. I work in user experience and a lot of my work ended up done by the parent software companies. I knew that if I wanted to keep working in the field (and I do love the work) I’d have to change jobs. But … I had extra time now (no longer working till nine or ten at night) and we were starting to get some writing done. It wasn’t daily yet, and we hadn’t finished anything, but we were getting there. If I changed jobs I’d likely get caught up learning the new job for a while.

As we started to get back into writing we found two problems. First up, our writing was clunky. It didn’t flow, it was hard work to actually produce anything, let alone anything we like. Some of the writing was bad, some just awkward and a little bit of it was good. And yes, we do agree that there’s no such thing as a bad first draft, that’s why you have second and subsequent drafts.

Secondly, we couldn’t finish anything. Based on our regular writing, we have two story ‘humps’. If we’re still going by 30,000 words then the story’s a stayer and we can finish it. There’s another hump around 60,000 words which we struggle to get over, but we do get over it. Post-covid we’ve been managing the 30,000 word limit with no problems, but really can’t get past the 60,000 words.

We have spent a lot of time analysing what changed and why and how we can get back our writing mojo.

Problems occurred because

• We broke long-defined writing habits and haven’t yet created new ones
• We didn’t separate work and writing; we wrote in the same place as we worked
• Covid isolation and working from home meant that we had less experiences outside of work/life, and absolutely no work-life balance
• We tried too hard to make writing work like it used to, and to finish our stuff, and because we were struggling, this made writing a chore.

We’re gradually fixing these things by

• Taking time off work—neither of us will be working a regular 9-5 job this year
• Not being so tough on our writing—if we stop writing at 60,000 words in then we stop writing (allowing ourselves to come back later to the story when we’re in the mood)
• Going back to some of the earlier exercises we used to do years ago. We’re planning our own mini NaNoWriMo (in May, not in November), for example
• Experimenting with our writing
• We’re travelling more, starting to get different experiences again.

We’re getting there, slowly.

Writing is gradually becoming fun again.

The knee operation went well.  Surgeon and physiotherapist are both happy with my progress.  So am I.

Thank you to everyone who sent good wishes.  I haven’t answered your mails personally, for reasons below, but they were appreciated.

I confess, I didn’t think it would knock me around quite so much physically.  For a few weeks there all I seemed to be able to manage was physio, take some painkillers, sit around a little, sleep, then repeat.  I have read books I can’t remember the plot of, played basic computer games like Solitaire, and haven’t done much else.  Life seems to be one long cycle of bed, physio, painkillers, bed.

It doesn’t help that there seems to be no comfortable chairs to sit in.  The couch is too low to get up from, the dining chairs are hard. Small problems in the scheme of things, but my back is noticing.

We have an over-bath shower at home, and the first three weeks I couldn’t manage to get into the bath, so I made do with sponge baths.  It has given me a renewed appreciation for those fantasy novels where the intrepid travellers reach an inn and take a sponge bath rather than bathe.  (A long time ago I voiced my opinion of bathing in tubs—it’s not as easy as it sounds.)  When we write fantasy our protagonists will have running water, hot and cold.

Glad to say, that particular washing difficulty is over, even if I do need a chair and a crutch to get into and out of the bath.

Speaking of crutches.  The physio has this little memory trick for the order of stepping with crutches on the stairs.  “Good step goes to heaven, bad step goes to hell.”  Meaning step with the good leg first if you’re going up stairs, step with the bad leg first if you’re going down.  (The difficulty is remembering where the crutch step goes in the sequence.) I’ve had Meatloaf’s Bad Girls Go to Heaven running through my brain ever since.

Hopefully back to more regular postings after this.