(Some days, you’ve got to love your job. Like, proofing pages from a fake children’s mag titled Five Eyes For Every Child.)

This week, my wife Ann and I have been doing some of the final proofing on the Steampunk Reloaded anthology (pages pictured above). It’s over 400 pages this time, and thankfully Tachyon’s managing editor, Jill Roberts, has spearheaded the main copy-editing/proofing efforts, while we’ve mostly focused on adjustments to image placement, re-checking the intro, and tweaking the 17,000-word “A Secret History of Steampunk” that forms the bulk of original fiction in the book. It’s unrelenting detail work, and important. It’s easy to drop the ball at this point and wind up with errors. Sustained concentration across many different stages of pre-production, production, and publication is key to creating a quality book. (It doesn’t hurt to have genius artist/designer John Coulthart doing the interior layouts.)

In a similar way this week, my colleague S.J. Chambers and I made final text changes to the Steampunk Bible—little tweaks, typo marking, and a few additions of text to help with the flow of images. We also just got done working with the editor to determine the final images and their placement—in the process picking up amazing new stuff by both J.K. Potter and Molly Crabapple. As you can see from the page below, part of the process is taking off all of the image note post-its (our editor has kept the final notes on that part of the process) and then just turning in the pages with text changes.

In going through this process, and also beginning to learn how to cook, it’s struck me that creating a good book and a good meal share some commonalities…

(more…)

This evening I had the weekly write-club session with my writing buddy Peter M. Ball (the man who committed the novella Horn). I went back over the novel, which I’ve not touched for about a month for a multitude of reasons (PhD, proofing short story collections and stories for various anthologies, fear, laziness, etcetera). I re-read the last chapter I’d written just to get a feel for it, to put myself back into the story (so I can distinguish the pseudo-fairytale German-like setting from the pseudo-Arabian Nights Damascus-like setting, and get my tone straight).

Everything was flowing rather well; I was happy with the state of the writing as I’d left it. It needs work, of course, it’s a bit skeletal in parts and needs a good hamburger of plot, but on the whole I was happy with the first draft. And then I came across one of those gems that a writer finds her/himself heir to … the things you insert into the text when you’ve not yet done enough research about a particular topic, so you put in square brackets, type in CAPS a note-to-self and highlight it in yellow. Or that’s my normal habit, at least. On this occasion I seem to have been a little laissez-faire and so what I actually found in the middle of a paragraph was this little beauty:

(more…)

Summer brought with it a trip to Malmedy in Belgium where we visited the Baugnez 44 Historical Centrum. I found myself quite impressed by the museum and while walking through it, I couldn’t help but be moved by the fate of the soldiers who were massacred at Baugnez. My son was very vocal in opining that the Germans were the evil guys and the Allied forces were heroes. Indeed, this is what history tells us, and there is no excusing the atrocities of the Nazi army. But, as I told my son, we cannot apply blame to an entire people because not all Germans condoned the acts of Hitler and not all Germans embraced his agenda. There is also something to be said about denial, and how it is possible for people to close their eyes wilfully because seeing is equal to accepting responsibility and accepting responsibility means having to take action, and action always involves risk. In this particular case, risk being a life or death thing.

I think it was Nalo Hopkinson who said to us at Clarion West that every character is a hero in their own story. This statement was brought home to me when we visited another museum at the border between Belgium and Germany. In this museum, there was an unlabelled case with memorabilia and relics from German soldiers. Looking at these relics, I wondered whether the German soldier considered himself a hero fighting for the beliefs of his Germany. I thought then of how there are casualties in every side in every war, and how on all sides there are victims. If we look at the enemies as individual people, hating is something we cannot do.

Sometime ago, I attended a talk given by Sarah Waters. Sarah spoke of how she was constantly busy with her fiction. How even when she was not writing physically, she was writing inside her head. While we were out in Belgium, I did not write as I had intended to, but the impressions I gathered have found their way to a story I am working on right now.  It’s somewhat political in nature having to do with armed struggle, the displacement of a tribal people, and the conflict between tribal right and corporate power. I was thinking of how my corporate people seemed too one-sidedly evil and I wondered whether the corporate people in my story saw themselves as saviors–as benefactors–instead of the villain I had presented them to be. I realized that the change came from how I no longer hated my corporate people as wholeheartedly as when I created the first draft of the story. While I did not condone or like them, I could write about them with compassion.

The challenge that faces me in writing this story is how fine the line is between preaching and storytelling. Too heavy a hand and it would be better to rent a church and start yelling at the top of your lungs. I feel that where a story succeeds is when it opens up room for conversation between the storyteller and the reader.  The conversation may not be a vocal one, but when the reader takes the story and moves with it into realms of his or her own speculation, then the story ceases to be a static thing on the page, it takes on a life of its own and that is what moves us.

Needless to say, I will only know if I succeeded with this story once it is read by someone other than myself.

*Angela is snoozing on an eighteenth century fainting couch, using a pile of books as a pillow, and blanketed by sheets of a A4 paper (printed on one side, double space, 12 pt font). A blue pen dangles from her limp fingers and a large blue splot of ink mars her wrinkled brow.*

Evil Monkey creeps closer, leans down and yells: Hey!

Angela: Argh!!! *flails about, falls off the eighteenth century fainting couch, swears* (a lot)

Evil Monkey: Did I wake you?

Angela: I’ve known you for what? A week and a half?

Evil Monkey: About that, yeah.

Angela: And I already hate you. (more…)

Gio Clairval is an Italian-born refugee who lives in Paris and writes in English, also translating stories from several languages she has forgotten to a language (this one) she has never really known. She’s published here and there and can be spotted, when she thinks you’re not looking, at Kosmochlor, first place in the internets (evar) to showcase Umberto Eco’s “rules for writing well” in the tongue Inglès. Being late at the wake is considered chic where she comes from.

The idea of this post came to me from the image of a floating city, a poster by French artist Stephan Muntaner (not the artwork displayed here), to be inserted in the forthcoming Bible of Steampunk brought to you by the master of this blog. The poster depicts an industrial city yanked away from earth along with a cushion of soil. An aerial impossibility.

(more…)

I’ve dealt with a lot of rejected/dejected writers this week, for one reason and another. They’ve been dejected because of the rejections. It’s completely understandable. Rejection hurts.

It somehow says ‘You’re not good enough’, no matter how confident you are of yourself as a person or as a writer. Sometimes a writer’s week brings more than one rejection, which just feels like the Universe has given you a paper cut and rubbed lemon juice into it.

(more…)

Guest bloggery: While one of Angela’s personalities is arguing with Evil Monkey about who pays for the coffee, another other part is over here, hopefully posting something useful … other personalities are variously conducting a shoe-shine business in New Orleans, drinking coffee in Melbourne and complaining about the weather, and planning a jewellery heist in Paris (wherein I will ultimately be caught due to the permanent nose print I left on the glass surrounding the French Crown jewels) …

I work in a writers centre dealing on a daily basis with – surprise – writers. Some days are great: people have intelligent questions, take advice, succeed. Other days, I feel like I’m chasing my tail, talking to myself, being punished by The Universe … and I start to think ‘If I smack my head against the wall hard enough, it will all go away.’ One of the things I see a lot is writers madly self-promoting … without having written so much as a word on a cocktail napkin or published even a short story or an opinion piece. Oh, they have ‘platform’ – but then, so do many of my shoes – but they have no product. And the fact that this is a problem seems to escape many of them.

And so, may I present a repost of Pondering, something I wrote last February when my brain was ‘sploding … (more…)

(Me showing Shared Worlds students Miranda Severance and Jackie Gitlin some pages from the comics adaptation of my story “The Situation”)

Guest blogging has begun to kick in, and you’ll continue to see it during the week.

Meanwhile, I’ve been teaching at Shared Worlds as well as doing things behind the scenes as assistant director, here at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina. We’ve got 39 students, and I have to say, they’re all extremely dedicated, creative, and smart. It’s only the second day and they’ve been keeping us on our toes. They’re in the world-building phase and I hear tell of floating islands on the backs of behemoths and steampunk druids and much more besides.

Soon we’ll transition into the writing, partially through a found object exercise. Tomorrow, Kathe Koja gets here, with Nathan Ballingrud following on Thursday. Scott Eagle leads artist workshops over the weekend and next week Holly Black, Will Hindmarch, Michael Bishop, Marly Youmans, and others will all make appearances. These kids have it good, let me tell you.

They’ll also get free books donated by publishers like Small Beer Press, Tor, Pyr, and many more.

Thursday night I read at Hub City Bookstore with Kathe and Nathan. I’m going to do something a little different and use some blown-up images from Eric Orchard’s amazing comics version of “The Situation” to substitute for some of the narrative. In effect subbing in images for some of the paragraphs. If it all goes catastrophically wrong they’ll soon forget it ever happened since I have two great readers following me.

NOTE: Jeremy Jones is blogging about Shared Worlds-related topics on Booklifenow this week and next.

Many people are predicting massive changes to publishing as we know it, and making the case for e-readers, e-books, and a future in which the physical book is only a part of how we view reading sustained, long texts. Here are a few things you should know about the future of publishing, including the fact that small presses may be on the forefront of the wave…

(more…)