(I really need an icon for this book. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything suitable.)

69,029 words. I will make it to 70,000 tomorrow. I kinda wanted it tonight, but the novel explained to me that this next bit needs more thinking, and I have become leery of the whole words-for-the-sake-of-words thing. (Why I will never do NaNoWriMo, short version.) Sometimes, you know, that's what you need, is just to push the damn hippopotamus another two inches up the hill, but it's too easy for me to get my perspective out of whack and get all invested in chasing the word count and let the important things kind of slide out of the story. Which is bad.

I am not, by the way, saying that measuring progress by word count is a bad thing or that people who use that as their metric are Doing It Wrong. I'm saying I found out the hard way that, FOR ME, it's a double-edged sword.

Also, today, I got my share of the money for "Boojum" being translated into Russian. I'm much more geeked about the translated-into-Russian part than the money, and would be even if the money were rather more substantial than it is. (Translated into Russian! A story I co-wrote! This is the glamor, baby. Right here. -- I get this way every time something of mine gets translated into a language I can't read, which thus far has been all of them.)

And for some reason, the sf espionage novella has woken up in my head again. This is why I never throw anything away. You never know when the wheel is going to turn round again.

1. Thank you, everyone, for the birthday wishes on Wednesday. So far, thirty-five is going pretty well.

2. One of my birthday presents was a ring made by Sara Jayne Cole. I think I've linked to her work before, but I gotta say, it's worth linking to again. (Disclaimer: she is a friend of my mother's.)

3. My birthday present to myself--and mirrorthaw--was buying a new bed with the advance from the goblin book. Since the bed we were sleeping on was the one I bought when I moved to Madison in 1996, you may rightfully say that this birthday present is neither self-indulgent nor, indeed, a moment too soon. Also, for the first time in our adult lives, we have an honest-to-god bed frame.

4. The bed frame has taught me that I do actually have a (rather dim and rudimentary) sense of spatial relations. I walked into it in the dark yesterday because I knew exactly where the bed was. Or, you know, used to be. I'm developing a lovely bruise on my thigh.

5. I have reached 65,000 words in the goblin book. 45,000 to go. Which will be easier once I figure out what the captain of the palace guard wants to talk to the emperor about.

I have a head cold, which I am blaming for the following weirdness.

mirrorthaw put in Peter Gabriel's greatest hits album, Hit, this evening, and as I always do when I hear it, I thought, "Man, 'Solsbury Hill' so has a story in it." But this time, the other songs ganged up and gave me one.* It's a YA sf semi-dystopian thriller/romance/bildungsroman (reluctant psychics! teenage soldiers! true love!), and my question to you is:

Poll #1476892 Blame the head cold
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 251

Should the romance be:

Of course, I reserve the right to ignore the poll results completely, but I'm curious.

---
*For the record, the playlist is:

"Jeux sans frontiers"
"Shock the Monkey"
"More than This"
"Solsbury Hill"
"Burn You Up, Burn You Down"
"Digging in the Dirt"
"Growing Up"
"Don't Give Up"
"Sledgehammer"
"More than This" (reprise)

So between the insomnia and the anxiety dreams (all clothing related, for some bizarre reason I wot not of), I think we can conclude that I'm stressed about something. No, don't ask me what. I DON'T KNOW. But it means that my thought processes have gotten simultaneously weirder and slower, so I can sort of watch my brain work. Like the Glass Cat's.

So, as I have been for several years now, I am thinking about getting a tattoo. I almost got one at Fourth Street, but bailed on account of the tattoo artist not seeming to understand what I wanted. But I have a birthday coming up (my thirty-fifth, which seems sort of pseudo-significant), and I'm thinking about it again. (Parenthetically, if anyone in the Madison area has recommendations about tattoo artists, please please please comment or email or something.) One of the designs I have been considering, on and off, is Dyson Cieslewisc's rabbit (the left-hand rabbit), from "Dexterity," my episode of Shadow Unit. Different reasons than Dice, but, well. And the thought crossed my mind again this morning, for reasons I can no longer reconstruct. Which is where we join the stream of consciousness in progress:

Int.
GUILDENSTERN: It is a very cool rabbit.
ROSENCRANTZ: But it's wrong. Year of the Tiger, not Year of the Rabbit.
GUILDENSTERN: Tigers are cool, too. A tiger tattoo could be pretty awesome.
ROSENCRANTZ: Wait a second. That's the Chinese Zodiac. That's cultural appropriation.
GUILDENSTERN: Shit, that's right. We'll have to--
[crackle of static]
THE RADIO: "It's the eye of the tiger / It's the thrill of the fight"
ROSENCRANTZ: [moans] Oh no, no, no, no, no.
THE RADIO: "Standing up to the challenge of our rivals"

Ext.
[Truepenny comes into the study from the kitchen]
[Mirrorthaw takes off his headphones]
TRUEPENNY: My brain is cursed.
MIRRORTHAW: Cursed?
TRUEPENNY: I have the acoustic cover of "Eye of the Tiger"* stuck in my head, and if that isn't a curse, I don't know what is.
MIRRORTHAW: Can I change the station?
TRUEPENNY: I don't know how!
[Truepenny exits back to kitchen, singing "It's the eye of the tiger / it's the thrill of the fight"]
[Mirrorthaw resumes his headphones]

Int.
GUILDENSTERN: Turn it off!
ROSENCRANTZ: Where's the off-switch?
GUILDENSTERN: There is no fucking off-switch!
ROSENCRANTZ: [shouting at ceiling] STOP IT THIS INSTANT! STOP IT! STOP IT! STOP IT!
THE RADIO: [triumphantly] "EYEEEEEEEEEE ... of the tiger"
[pause]
[Rosencrantz & Guildenstern look around warily]
THE RADIO: "Won't you ease on down, ease on down the road?"
ROSENCRANTZ & GUILDENSTERN: [simultaneous facepalms]

Ext.
[enter Truepenny to the study again]
[Mirrorthaw takes off his headphones and waits]
TRUEPENNY: I have proof that I was IRRETRIEVABLY WARPED by junior high school chorus.
MIRRORTHAW: [looks alarmed]
TRUEPENNY: In my head, "Eye of the Tiger" segues immutably into "Ease On Down the Road." Because we did medleys. "Eye of the Tiger," "Ease On Down the Road."
MIRRORTHAW: Are you sure I can't change the channel? Where's the remote? Everything comes with a remote these days.
TRUEPENNY: Ah, but I was made before 1980.
MIRRORTHAW: Oh god that's right. There is no remote.
TRUEPENNY: Not even one with a cord.
MIRRORTHAW: Just push-buttons.
TRUEPENNY: Maybe some dials.
MIRRORTHAW: And I don't know where they are!

Int.
ROSENCRANTZ: [timidly] The rabbit's from a netsuke. Does that mean it's no good, either?
GUILDENSTERN: Dunno. There's always the labyrinth idea. Or the octopus. Or get somebody to design a sort of catfish-dragon thing.
ROSENCRANTZ: [ponders]
GUILDENSTERN: [ponders]
THE RADIO: "It's the eye of the tiger ..."


---
*Mirrothaw found it somewhere, because The Internet Is Full Of Things.

Werewolf story finished, 6,000 words, except that (a.) it's turned into the first chapter of a novel on me and (b.) it's drivel. Utter damnable drivel.

---

My aquarium has a new inhabitant, who was sold as a blue mystery snail, but who I believe is actually an apple snail, specifically a Pomacea bridgesii. The snail's name is Louise. (No, don't ask me, I don't know either. I put the snail in the tank, it opened its trapdoor to start looking around, and I thought, You go, Louise! You now know as much as I do. The fish, on the other hand, still does not have a name. He doesn't seem to require one.) Louise is fascinating and weirdly beautiful in a tentacled Lovecraftian way.

---

Tomorrow the ninjas go in for their annual check-up. They would dread it more than I do if they knew, but they don't know, so I'm dreading it for all three of us.

---

Piccadilly notebooks, while obviously Moleskine knock-offs, are (a.) cheaper, especially if you get them on clearance at Borders and (b.) use thicker paper, so--if you are a fountain pen user--there's less bleed-through than with Moleskine. Thus far, I certainly do not like them less.

---

There was probably something else, but I've forgotten what it is.

I have lost the index card on which I kept track of the submission history of the zombie coyote story. Now, as I never throw anything away (just ask my poor long-suffering spouse), I know it's here somewhere. But, on the other hand, as I never throw anything away . . .

This is hardly the Fall of Carthage, as tragedies go, but it means that I no longer have a record of where I have and have not subbed that story. And since it was teetering on the verge of being trunked, that means there's an awful lot of markets to which I can no longer say with certainty whether I submitted it or not. (Memory like a steel wossname, yes.) And this in turn makes me feel grumpy and incompetent and who told me I was fit to be let out on my own?

I get story ideas from dreams fairly often ("Straw" is a readily available example, if you're curious), but this is the first time I've had an insight into narrative craft.

The idea that a narrative is a series of questions is not a new one. It's another way to think of genre, if you're approaching it from the academic rather than the marketing angle: a genre can be defined as the list of questions a story chooses to answer. (Notice that it isn't the story's answers that necessarily define its genre, but the questions it engages with.) And it has occurred to me, in thinking about this dream of mine, that one way to judge the degree of conventionality of a given story is to look at how many of its answers you can predict before you finish it (or before you even start). The question of all romance is, "Will the protagonist find true love?" If you're reading a category romance, you know that the answer is yes before you so much as read the first line. (I deliberately chose an extreme example to make it obvious what I'm trying to say.) If the story poses a question ("What's wrong with this protagonist?") and you immediately roll your eyes and answer ("He's insane." "She's dreaming." "He's a vampire." "She's a ghost."), then you are reading a highly conventional story. If the story poses a question and you don't know the answer--or you think you know the answer and it proves you wrong--then you are reading a story that is either not conventional or that has deliberately engaged with its conventions in order to confound them.

None of this was the point of my dream.

The point of the dream was the relationship between conventionality and narrative tension.* It pointed out first that, yes, if the story poses a question and the reader knows the answer ("Will the homicidal demon nutbar take out the hapless bystanders in the teaser?" "Oh HELL yes."), there's likely to be a significant decrease in narrative tension, and a significant INCREASE in reader impatience, especially if the answer is not something the reader wants to watch play out. (I badly wanted to be able to TIVO my imagination at that point, so we could just skip past the part with the riding lawnmower. And on the other side, think of the disgust of the little boy in The Princess Bride: "Is this a kissing book?")

But if this were a simple 1-to-1 correspondence, there would be no market for highly conventional stories, and it takes only the most minimal acquaintance with the media-consumption habits of the modern age to see that that ain't so. And my dream went on to show reasons why that's so, how the answering of questions interacts with narrative tension, even if the audience knows the answers.

Point one, most obviously, is that narrative tension is heightened if the reader doesn't know the answer. What do the mysterious partially excavated underground fortifications have to do with the homicidal demon nutbar? (I never did get an answer to that one.) Even if the big question of your story has a conventional answer (Will the protagonist find true love?), you can still have plenty of narrative tension around the questions of "how?" and "with whom?"

But the second thing, and the thing that I hadn't ever realized consciously before, is that you can generate narrative tension by deferring the answer. In particular, by introducing other questions related to the conventional question which are not themselves conventional. So, given that my dream was pretending to be a TV show, the main (and conventional) question was, Will our heroes defeat the homicidal demon nutbar? And we know the answer is yes, even if I woke up before they managed it. But--unlike the thing with the riding lawnmower--that question isn't answered as soon as it's posed, nor is it obvious what the answer is. Beyond "yes"--but the question of "how?", which can't be answered right away, is the thing that any narrative is about. Narratives aren't about yes/no questions; they're about "how?" And before that question ("how will they defeat the homicidal demon nutbar?") began to be answered, new questions were put into play, like the underground fortifications, and the fact that our heroes were being transported willy-nilly from one alternate universe to another, all focused around those fortifications and the homicidal demon nutbar. What's the connection? I still don't know. The dream teased me with a partial answer (and, no, I wasn't really surprised to learn that the fortifications had human bones mortared into their foundations), but it deferred the resolution past the span of the dream. (Yes, thank you, I am frustrated by this.)

Of course, it is possible to lean too heavily on the tactic of deferral; you have to judge how long your audience will remain interested in a question before they need an answer, and likewise, how many complicating questions they will tolerate. I despaired and gave up on Robert Jordan because it didn't seem as if the major questions of The Wheel of Time were ever going to be answered and I could no longer keep track of all the complicating questions he'd thrown at me, but I know that a great many people have not given up. So that particular question is a matter of the alchemy between writer and reader and thus, like all such things, unfathomable.

But I understand something about building narrative that I've never fully grasped before. Which isn't bad for a night's work.

---
*For the two people who probably want to know, the dream was pretending to be an episode of Supernatural. I don't know why, as I have watched in total about three minutes of one episode of that show in my entire life, but it is not news that my subconscious moves in mysterious ways.

The dreams about failing high school calculus HAVE GOT TO STOP. Especially like the one I had last night, in which I dreamed I was failing high school calculus and then woke up to discover it was true. ARGH.

---

Made progress on the new wolf book yesterday. Let's be generous and call it 500 words. Which is 500 more words than I've written in a kind of appallingly long time.

---

The indefatigable fidelioscabinet has found an awesome photo-reference for Mehitabel. This is Natalia Alexandrova Pushkina, the younger daughter of Aleksandr Pushkin, and if I could have had her on the cover of The Mirador, I would have been a very happy Mole. (No, it isn't an exact match, but it's really startlingly close.)

---

I'm not bothering with segues today, but if I were, this would be a good one to my first Q&A question:

Q: I am super interested in what you told the cover artists of ACE. From the previous posts, I am inclined to believe that you had very little input in the whole cover art business, but you did mention that you described the tattoos and they listened. Would you have wanted the cover art done any other way? If you had said you weren't satisfied, what would have happened?

A: My input extended only so far as the artist and the production team decided to listen to me. (I did object to the cover of The Mirador because I found--and, honestly, still find--the size and shape of Mehitabel's head disturbing. It did me no good.) When they asked me questions, I answered them and was delighted when my answers showed up in the cover art: Felix's tattoos, the cityscape behind Mildmay--the cover of The Virtu is probably my favorite for precisely that reason--Mehitabel's dress. In three of four cases, my descriptions of the characters were followed: Kay, for instance, does look like David McCallum on the cover, and that's exactly how I described him for the artist. Mehitabel is the exception there.

Okay, that's an honest answer to your question, but I want to be clear that it isn't a complaint. I think the covers for these books are fantastic. They're compositionally strong--which many fantasy covers aren't--they have coherent color schemes, they give an impression of lush baroquerie which is exactly what's called for. Most importantly from the purely mercenary point of view, they do exactly what they're supposed to do, which is catch people's attention. I've gotten emails from several people who have confessed to picking up Mélusine on the strength of the cover alone. The fact that devoted readers (and the neurotic pink circus poodle of an author) can list everything the covers get wrong is, well, par for the course.

Q: How did you choose the titles of the individual books of DoL? The main reason that I can think of is because most of them are the places all the events which transpire in, but then Virtu throws a wrench right at that reasoning, and it's really gnawing at me like a rat.

A: I did not choose the titles. Ace did. My titles were Strange Labyrinths, The Labyrinth's Heart, Labyrinths Within, and The Labyrinth of Summerdown. (I've mentioned before that I suck at titles, right?) And even after they'd explained their single-word evocative-of-fantasy title theory, I wanted to call the second book Kekropia and the fourth book Summerdown, and got vetoed again.

Q: ( spoilers for Corambis )

---

Q: I have been trying to find a paperback copy of The Virtu, and nobody seems to have one. Do you happen to know where I could find one? All the others in the series are available, but that seems to have disappeared...

A: The Virtu is out of print in both hardback and paperback. I am really really sorry. My agent is making a formal protest on my behalf to Ace, and if/when the situation changes, I will definitely make an announcement.

---

Q: I have a question more about one of your short stories than about your books (which I liked a lot, but I can't think of any question that has not been asked yet): I enjoyed "A night in Electric Squidland" very much and remember faintly that you said you wrote or planned on writing more short stories with Mick and Jamie. If you have written and published them, is there a way for this fan from beyond the sea (Great Britain) to buy or read them?

A: I have not managed to publish any more stories about Mick and Jamie. (I have one written that no one will buy, and something else that seems to be the first chapter of a novella, and then three or four other ideas that are thus far obstinately refusing to be phrased in the form of a story.) Hopefully, this situation will change for the better.

---

Q: What's your preferred baseball team, if any? I only ask this because of, well, I suppose an auxiliary reference question--the writer Ynge, is it a reference to Brandon Inge?

A: I forget where I got Ynge's name, but no. It wasn't that.

I was raised an Atlanta Braves fan. Now, mirrorthaw and I follow the Milwaukee Brewers on the radio. But I'm more a baseball fan than I am a fan of any particular team.

[You can still ask your question(s) here.]

---

ETA: The Sekrit Origin of the Virtu revealed! (Hint: it isn't the toaster.)

1. My dreams are becoming densely narrative again. (Not necessarily coherent, mind you, but narrative.) This is a good sign.

2. Embarrassing confession #1: I really like "All I Need Is A Miracle" (Mike + the Mechanics). Although I like it better when it's about the desperate band manager finding the billionaire's beloved mopdog (as in the video) than when it's about a guy realizing he's been an asshole.

3. Embarrassing confession #2: I was being super-organized this afternoon: paying the electric bill and getting it into the mailbox just before the mail carrier reached our house, as I was getting ready to go to the dentist. Super organized. Made of win.

And then there's that terrible sinking feeling when you look at your desk and see the check to the electric company sitting there like Patience smirking on a monument.

So I grabbed the check and dashed out of the house. Mailman had already been by. Curses! Mail truck still parked at corner. Rejoice! Intercepted mailman. Retrieved envelope. Got check in, resealed envelope with tape, carried off to dental appointment (only five minutes late and made hygienist laugh with story), and mailed on the way back.

4. J. G. Ballard died last week, Stephen Hawking is in the hospital, and Electric Velocipede could really use some in-bound cash flow.

5. Oh, and WisCon needs more panelists.

So last night as I was sorting out my blankets (this is a complicated process, as anyone who has ever shared a hotel room with me can attest), I discovered under the bed one of my new winter boots. The right one, to be exact. The left boot, as I determined this morning, is in the front hall where it ought to be.

I have no idea how my right boot ended up under the bed. Goodness knows I'm absent minded, and I do have a tendency to leave things where they fall, but I really do think I'd remember walking UPSTAIRS and INTO THE BEDROOM in ONLY ONE BOOT. And we won't even go into my possible motivations for such a performance.

The other option is that one (or more) of the cats absconded with my boot and stashed it under the bed like a leopard with its prey. But this is equally difficult to believe, as it is not a small boot--well, it is a small boot, comparatively, since I'm only a size 7, but it's a waterproof, insulated, Upper-Midwest-we-take-this-snow-thing-SERIOUSLY boot, so as an object it takes up nearly as much space as the smallest of the cats, and even the largest of the cats would have some difficulty carrying it, not to mention the whole UPSTAIRS part. Also, while the ninjas, particularly in their kittenhood, had a tendency toward kleptomania, their prey was always SMALL objects (contact lens cases, prescription bottles, pens, etc.). Not boots.

And, you know, I'm home all day. I would have heard the inevitable ruckus attendant on such an undertaking.

So yeah. I got nothin'. Except a boot under my bed.

---

The internet is truly full of things this Friday, particularly amazing photographs.

(via oracne): selenak went to Tanzania and has posted her pictures of African wildlife. The pictures taken with a telephoto lens are especially impressive.

(via coffeeem): High speed photographs of various objects being shot with an air rifle.