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Quoth the raven, NaNo More! by Timekeeper Art

It’s been a rough couple of scenes….

I’m at our annual creative retreat, working on rewrites for Kin & Kind, the final installment of the Shard & Shield trilogy.

We are six writers and artists, including K.T. Ivanrest, Timekeeper Art, “And Sewing Is Half the Battle!”, and Burnt Cookie Books. We are eating obscene amounts of leftover Halloween candy and working on various creative projects. We have a big page on the wall to record achievements, demon tomatoes, in-context and out-of-context quotes, helpful reminders, etc.

a long sheet of paper with multi-colored quotes and drawings
Lots of random stuff.

Right now I’m adding new material, and it’s… a bit rough on my story world. My colleagues have added an at-retreat tally to the wall board.

It’s been a rough couple of scenes….

My New & Improved Walking Desk!

image of Titan Fitness Under Desk Walking Treadmill on wood laminate floor
Yes, the pawprints mean the dogs tried it first.

It’s been a while since I started my walking desk experiment and I have finally worked it out. I have a sit/stand desk from Ikea and an elevated monitor, which has really helped my back and neck pain since I no longer look down. (Sorry, laptop in bed and on the couch. I love you, but you’re not good for me.) I had still been using my original treadmill, however, which technically did the job and was undoubtedly cheap. It had a timeout “feature” though and would stop the belt suddenly, which could be quite disorienting if I were in the zone.

My New & Improved Walking Desk!

Paper Marbling

In Shard & Shield, Ariana’s friend Ranne is a bookbinder. Tonight I needed to add a bit of activity, without repeating one of her usual procedures, and so I went off to review traditional bookbinding.

Even though I needed only a single sentence, traditional crafts are so fascinating that I ended up watching multiple videos far beyond my needs. This one I found particularly gorgeous:Paper Marbling

The Women of Weinsberg. (King Conrad III occupied the town Weinsberg in 1140. The women carry their husbands after being granted to leave and allowed to take their belongings.) Lithograph, c. 1910. Sarotti-chocolate picture.

The “Problem” With Strength and Femininity

So a couple of weeks ago there was a little cluster of complaints again online about why can’t we just have women characters embracing their femininity instead of doing all these hero things.

This could be puzzling at first, because a lot of these complaints come from folks who also espouse things like “motherhood is the ultimate heroic act” which seem to suggest that femininity can be heroic, but of course the actual meaning is about traditional gender roles.

And this is boggling to me, because women can be pretty darned heroic while being extremely feminine.

The Women of Weinsberg. (King Conrad III occupied the town Weinsberg in 1140. The women carry their husbands after being granted to leave and allowed to take their belongings.) Lithograph, c. 1910. Sarotti-chocolate picture.
The Women of Weinsberg.
Lithograph, c. 1910.

I’ve covered a number of historical examples before, so this time let’s take the legendary women of Weinsberg. When their town’s conqueror announced the men would all be executed but the women could leave with whatever valuables they could carry on their own backs, the women marched out carrying their husbands. How many of those husbands, d’ya think, were up there piggyback thinking, “Geez, I wish my wife was more demurely feminine”? Or do you think he might have at that moment valued her extremely feminine protectiveness, strength, and even stubborn defiance of authority?The “Problem” With Strength and Femininity

Sanjuro final duel, two samurai facing each other with spectators in background

Write Fights Right!

Sanjuro final duel, two samurai facing each other with spectators in background
If you’ve seen Sanjuro, you know this isn’t a still, but a playing video.

I love good fight scenes. In a story, I want to feel the action. In a film, I want tightly choreographed combat. It’s fine if it’s realistic (the long tension of Sanjuro‘s final duel, and we’ll just ignore the period blood effects), fake realistic (the bloody impact of Logan), crazy physics-defying martial arts (the alternate-world movement of The Matrix), or just plain fun (Captain America kicking Nazi tail). But lame action, the writer glossing over it or the director trying to fake it with shaky cam, makes me feel cheated.

So I try to write good action scenes. And most of the time I feel I do an okay job.

But I’ve been really struggling with one scene. It’s very short, an attempted bar fight which is over in under three seconds. But because it’s so fast, it’s hard to write; I don’t want to lose flow or add length with a lot of explanation, yet the physical actions are fairly complex. I’d been frustrated by this for an embarrassingly long time. So I called in an expert, Carla Hoch.

Write Fights Right!

#WIPjoy for Shard & Shield: Music and Playlists

Today’s #WIPjoy topic is “songs on your MCs’ playlists,” which is frankly too big to answer effectively on social media (sorry, Twitter), so we’re doing it here on the blog.

I have a bonus to this post, too. First I have my own playlists for primary characters, and then I have a guest DJ Kayla, who beta-read Shard & Shield last week and told me then she had made character playlists, which of course meant I had to ask her to chime in on today’s #WIPjoy topic.

#WIPjoy for Shard & Shield: Music and Playlists

BAIT by Laura VanArendonk Baugh. BAIT. They eat us to live. We eat them to live forever.

Writer Brains and Research

Jules Verne, French science fiction writer of ...
Jules Verne, the godfather of plausible speculative fiction. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Fantasy is even harder to write,” I alleged recently, “because you have to make the science work.”

If the science in a story isn’t plausible — whether you actually call it science, as in hard sci-fi, or whether it’s simply background dressing or setting, as in a romance set aboard a diving boat — the rest of the story won’t be plausible, either. In the romance above, for example, even if the story is supposedly just boy-meets-girl, if the couple blithely dives hundreds of meters without special equipment and resurfaces without ill effects, I’m not going to buy the happily-ever-after.Writer Brains and Research

Beware of Writers

English: Beware of Bull Beware of Bull on publ...
This photo is not directly relevant to being cautious of writers. It’s just great on its own. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’ve said that people just passing through a hotel hosting a writers’ convention must be frequently alarmed. For example, I was sitting in the hall at my last such conference and overheard someone pleading for ideas on how to dispose of a body. “I tried burying it, but that didn’t work,” he said, “and I’ve thought about acid in a tub but it didn’t seem likely to clean up well. Can you help?”
Beware of Writers