Author Archives: Kate Elliott

2011 becomes 2012

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I’m in the enviable position of living in one of the last places on the globe to celebrate the end of the day, so I can amuse myself watching the new year tick over every where else. Although actually I spent much of the day traveling, and am now home.

I have little to say about 2011 except that it was a very hard year in several ways, mostly to do with a death in my extended family (not in my immediate nuclear family, I hasten to add) but also to do with some other things. My confidence was badly shaken for reasons I’m unlikely to discuss except to say that, in writing terms, as common as it is to cycle between peaks of triuumph and troughs of despair, it is (unfortunately) a not uncommon part of the longer term (across the years) writing process to hit greater than normal chasms on occasion triggered by any number of things. It’s okay. It happens. The hard part is to dig out and keep going.

So I resolve to not be silenced by anxiety and doubt in 2012. Or, to put a positive spin on it: I resolve to trust in my own voice. And I hope that for you, as well: May 2012 be a year where you can speak in one form or another with a strong, true voice.

I hope also for a generous heart, and for good health, for all, as far as that can go, for these are no little things.

It can be so hard sometimes.

But to quote one of my favorite writers, Tricia Sullivan:

We must press on.

So here’s to a new year of pressing on resolutely.

I leave you with a link.

My sister gave me a CD of a local Eugene (out of Montana) folk group. Well, you know, local folk groups. This could go any way at all. But I trust my sister’s musical tastes, and indeed, Betty and the Boy is a fabulous and wonderfully interesting duo with some lovely melodic work.

Their web page.

Here’s “Moth to a Light”

Happy New Year!

Giveaway: ARC of Touchstone, by Melanie Rawn

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I recently had the pleasure of reading an ARC (advanced reading copy) of Melanie Rawn’s forthcoming novel TOUCHSTONE (Book One of The Glass Thorns).

It’s due on the shelves in February 2012.

Because this time of year in the USA (and other places as well) is the season of gift giving, I’m giving away the ARC.

Rules (ETA: Yes, it’s open internationally)

1) Post a comment to enter (either here or on my LiveJournal mirror)

between now and midnight on December 25.

2) On December 26 I will announce the winner (drawn randomly from all entries) on this blog (they’ll then need to contact me so I can mail them the ARC).

 

Here is the back of the book description:

Cayden Silversun is part Elven, part Fae, part human Wizard–and all rebel. His aristocratic mother would have him follow his father to the Royal Court, to make a high-society living off the scraps of kings. But Cade lives and breathes for the theater, and his troupe is something very special.

The four of them intend to enter the highest reaches of society and power, but not the way Cade’s mother thinks they should. They’ll be the greatest players of all time, or die trying.

Come experience the magic of Touchstone: wholly charming characters in a remarkably original fantasy world. You’ll never want to leave.

 

Here’s what I said:

Melanie Rawn is in her usual fine form with a vivid world and thoroughly captivating characters. A masterful blend of plot, character, and setting makes reading seem effortless in this tale of four young men devoted to the magical theater of their world. Rawn’s skill as a writer brings you right onto the stage with them.

 

And here’s the Publishers’ Weekly review:

Rawn takes heroic fantasy to its logical conclusion, creating a lived-in world where the scars from magical wars still linger and pure blood is a thing of the distant past. Cayden Silversun is the playwright and manager of the up-and-coming magical theater group Touchstone, alongside his friends Rafe and Jeska and the startlingly talented Mieka Windthistle. Despite their differences, wild Mieka and sensible Cade become fast friends. Shunned by his family, Cade is driven to prove himself, pushing Touchstone to ever greater heights. But as their fame grows, so do Mieka’s drug abuse and self-destructive behavior. Cade, troubled by prophetic visions of Mieka’s possible futures, wonders whether he has the right—or the obligation—to interfere with his impetuous friend’s choices. This strong, heartfelt, and familiar performer’s tale is full of astonishing promise, powerful but co-dependent friendships, insecurity, and addiction, and it will appeal to fantasy fans and theater lovers alike. (Feb.)
Reviewed on: 12/05/2011

 

 

 

2012 Blog Goals: A Survey

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This is in the nature of an experiment with a cool new utility called Urtak, a simple but elegant survey mechanism.

I’m currently thinking about what sort of things I might want to do with this blog for 2012, when I hope to do a lot of fiction writing and back it up with other material as well.

The questions come in a Yes/No/Don’t Care format. I’ve posted some basic ones and I already have a couple more I may add. Best of all, readers can suggest questions which I can then add (or not). Also, please feel to comment as per the usual way if you have any thoughts either on things you would like to see on this blog in 2012 or on using a survey to ask questions in general.

Here we go:


2012 Kate Elliott Blog Goals

Rory gets his own story, plus a giveaway

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For months now I have been promising a short story about Rory, Cat’s half brother who is a sabertooth cat.

It is now finished, and you can find it right here on this website by clicking through onto the Extras page. Or by clicking here.

Also, until Dec 17 there is a giveaway on this guest post now up on the excellent book blogging site, BookSmugglers.

I also mention three 2011 books that were among my favorites of the year as part of Book Smugglers’ Smugglivus celebration.

An interview, alternate history, reading, & Anne McCaffrey

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Over at The Ranting Dragon site & forum, an interview with me just went up.

Among other things, I talk about some aspects of the world building of the Spiritwalker books;

Additionally, the legal system in the world is not the same as in ours. There is no English common law here; law is based on a rough amalgamation of Roman civil law, what we know of Celtic law, and some very basic elements drawn from reconstructions of the famous Mali charter called the Kurukan Fuga. I also made an attempt to show family structures as they might have evolved out of different culture traditions. In book two, I try very imperfectly to portray a conception of rights that is more community-based rather than individually-based because of the differing nature of community and relationship in West African and indigenous Native American societies.

I also answer the questions if I prefer to read female writers (over male writers) and why I value diversity in genre fiction. And more! Much more!

I have struggled to think of what I might say about Anne McCaffrey’s work. I read the first Dragonflight trilogy, the Dragonsinger trilogy, the first Crystal Singer book, Restoree, and The Ship Who Sang. If I read other of her books or stories I don’t recall, as the ones I list are the ones that stayed with me. I’ve not re-read them.

It’s really difficult for me to quantify what the books meant to me, harder than I thought it would be because her death has forced me to consider the part her novels played in my development as a writer. I never met Anne McCaffrey, and I never wrote to her. But she is one of the women who made my career possible because she helped forge that path.

These were the books in which girls got to have sfnal adventures. I think it’s easy to ignore how revolutionary they were — but they were.

If I had rebooted Star Trek

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I hear rumors they’ll be starting to film the second rebooted Star Trek film in January.

I watched the original Star Trek (the classic edition) as a child, mostly on afternoon repeats. Bones was my favorite, but as a girl, watching Uhura every week be an officer on a starship meant a huge amount to me because it meant I wasn’t crazy to think that was something I could dream about.

In later years I watched The Next Generation and what came to be my favorite of the Treks, Deep Space Nine. I even watched as much Voyager as I could stand, although I’ve never seen Enterprise. I’ve also watched all of the films. But of course the original Trek had the greatest impact on me because it was unusual in its day. It pushed the envelope.

So you can imagine my disappointment when “rebooting” Star Trek really didn’t mean rebooting the vision. It just meant most of the same 20th century conceptions only with young actors, better CGI, and a plot that didn’t quite hold up.

Did I really reach this age and be forced to watch the young James Kirk as a rebellious, impulsive boy racing a car in a chase scene down a road? Seriously? That’s it? That’s my reboot?

I wish they had let ME reboot Star Trek.

Let me start with my fantasy cast.

 

Ensign Jamie Kirk should obviously be played by someone young, smart, kickass, tough, and hot. A bit of a rebel. Yeah, like this.

 

(Zoe Saldana)

 

Spock is always a difficult choice, and in this case older than the others, but that’s okay as the most important qualification is present: She’s Jewish.

 

(Sophie Okonedo)

 

Given Hollywood’s evident belief in the interchangeable nature of Asian-Americans, I thought for Sulu it would be okay to go for a Korean-American with some martial arts experience.

 

(Jamie Chung)

 

As for Scotty, since no one can really replace James Doohan in that role, I felt the best bet would be to insist the person actually be Scots, to get the accent right.

 

(Katie Leung)

 

As I mentioned above, Bones (L. McCoy) was my favorite character. Who should play the doctor?

 

(Freema Agyeman)

 

That leaves us with the iconic Uhura, a name taken (according to Wikipedia, so correct me if I’m wrong) from the Swahili word for freedom, Uhuru. I loved Nichelle Nichols in that ground-breaking role. So I’d like to make sure that the role is played by someone the writers will give a lot of screen time to, so the role isn’t given short-shrift or downplayed as a love interest. Uhuru it is.

 

 

(Chris Pine)

 

You’ve noticed I’m missing Chekhov (Walter Koenig was so safely CUTE to my pre-teen eyes). Probably because the whole OMG-they-have-a-Russian-guy-on-the-same-ship-despite-the-Cold-War vibe isn’t quite so startling now.

That’s where you come in. Whom would you cast as Chekhov? And why? Or would you change out Chekhov for a different character? And if so, why?

Inspiration for a novel can come from the strangest places (Spiritwalker)

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Last Friday my sister told me that one of the reasons she liked the Spiritwalker books so much was that the banter reminded her of 30s screwball comedies.

I have to say that this was not a comparison that would have leaped to my mind, nor is it one that had ever occurred to me.

She went on to explain that what she loved about the banter in 30s screwball comedies (and their related cousins, 30s musicals of the kind in which we might see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers) is that the banter between the romantic couple highlights the the equality of the pair both in intelligence and strength of will. That sort of banter only works if it is going both ways, and if both characters engage in it in equal measure.

Before Spiritwalker, I would have told you that I could not write fiction that was funny. There may be occasional amusing bits in my other books (some more than others) but mostly my epic fantasy is Big Ticket Serious (and emotional and exciting, one hopes, but nevertheless serious). I can’t pun or write jokes. And I have never possessed the right form of cleverness to write witty fantasy-of-manners type repartee, in which the characters are exceedingly clever and droll.

But I watched a lot of 30s screwball comedy when I was in my 20s because it appealed to me so much, I think because of that sense of equality between the lead couple my sister discussed. Hepburn and Grant, Fred and Ginger: It works because the scripts treat them as equals.

I guess the lesson here is twofold.

One, you never know and cannot predict what readers are going to see in your books.

Two, you never know what is filtering down through the layers of the mind and how or when things will emerge or in what transmuted form.

Will we ever be able to fathom the mystery of how the mind turns experience into story?

Fiction as Inspiration: “It’s like getting a crush on a book.”

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I ‘m sometimes asked in interviews, “What book {that you didn’t write but loved or admired] do you wish you had written?”

I always answer: None.

When I fall in love with a novel that I haven’t written, one of the reasons I fall in love with it is exactly that I couldn’t have written it. If I could have, I guess I would have. Instead, I’m so thrilled and even grateful to read a story I wouldn’t have told, and therefore could never have encountered if there hadn’t been another writer there to write it with that person’s unique vision and sensibility.

There’s a flip side to that question.

I know a number of writers who got serious about writing after they read a story or book they considered so poorly done that they said to themselves, “I can do better than this.”

I don’t specifically recall having one of those moments, either.

But if you take those two questions, mash them together, something does emerge about fiction as inspiration.

Every good novel I read is an inspiration, and I’ve read a lot of good novels in my time (or at least novels that worked for me, regardless of whether other readers might have thought them good).

Sometimes I read a novel that is both good and which also just hits all my sweet spots. It may or may not be better than other books I’ve read, but it gets up under my ribs and straight into my heart.

I just finished reading an unpublished (and not under contract) novel that involved me so deeply with a subject matter and approach that I don’t see often but which really hit home for me, that the pleasure and thrill of reading story overtook me, made my heart race, made me stay up way too late. Made me smile with the pure joy of falling so hard.

It’s like getting a crush on a book.

When that happens, I get excited all over again about writing. I remember how wonderful it is to be on the reading end of a story that captures me that strongly. Remembering that makes me able to dive back in with renewed excitement and vigor to my own writing. Reading a novel that takes me in that manner makes me want to write, not as competition, but as celebration.

It can happen! It’s there! It’s awesome!

That’s inspiration.

APEC comes to Hawaii

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We’re avoiding town (what those of us in the exurbs of Honolulu call Honolulu) because of the APEC conference which has so far involved much road closure and gridlock. There have been other signs of the conference here as well: long overdue improvements and beautification put into the airport; rousting homeless and moving them out of any place where they might be seen and thus diminish the allure of paradise; the killing of a local man by a federal security official here for APEC, a bizarrely disturbing situation in which very little information has been released about the incident in contrast to how much information we would usually know given that shooting deaths are quite rare here. Also, Iolani Palace has been closed for the duration of the conference because of security concerns about Hawaiian Sovereignty protestors. Let me know if you’ve read about any of these elements; I’d be curious to know if they are being reported outside the local area.

Tomorrow we will drive into town but will as always avoid Waikiki. Should be interesting.

The One True Method

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As NaNoWriMo trundles on, with greater and lesser success for the many involved, and as other writers simply write, because that’s what they do, I reflect on the statement I would most like to repeat to aspiring writers. And to myself, because it never gets obsolete and yet I do need to remind myself periodically that it is true and bears repeating (although most of you already know).

There is no One True Method or one Best Method or Preferred Method.

There is just the method that works best for you.

And furthermore, the method that works best for you on Project A may not be the method that works best for you on Project B, because different projects may demand different methods.

Talking about process and method is valuable because it helps me/you/us think about how and why I/you/we write. It creates a sense of community, and shared difficulty and triumph. It helps unveil tricks and methods and processes that may work for you, or may help resolve your own realization that you do (or do not) have a process that is working well for you.

Writing is a constant pattern of learning and re-nogotiating with creativity, of challenge, retreat, doubt, and those times when the flow runs unimpeded.

The secret is not in learning what works for others. It’s in learning what works for you.