First draft, page one:

Clicking on it should make it even more legible.  So, what do we have here?  We have a bunch of stuff that I pretty much barfed on to the page, to put it indelicately.  I knew my character’s state of mind, and that’s what I started with, which means this version begins with a ton of description — including the cardinal sin of having the character describe herself while looking in a mirror.  I don’t know what I was thinking.  All I know is I came back to the story and knew it all had to go.  All the information about Louisa?  (You see where all that research I did comes into play, yeah?)  Also has to go, but since I talk about Louisa just a couple of pages later, I can move this section to there.  Present the information when it’s relevant, not when it isn’t.  Perfect!

Also, you know how writers always talk about “show don’t tell?”  There’s a perfect example here of a place where I should have shown instead of told.  So instead of having the first line of dialog be “He’s the heir,” why not include the dialog that leads up to that statement?  I can cut the exposition, and more effectively illustrate the character of Alexandra by actually having her speak.

The rest of the changes I made are logistical — making sure the prose reads smoothly, that I’m not repeating actions/descriptions, and that the text flows and there’s nothing that will throw the reader out.

Also, before revising, I spent a few minutes thinking about what I wanted this story to look like.  It’s essentially a family comedy with some old-fashioned sense-of-wonder thrown in — I want it be rather fast-paced, “breezy,” so that I don’t run the risk of bogging the reader down.  I want the reader drawn in and charmed.  That’s what I kept in mind, which lead me to make the changes I did — removing exposition and so on.  So, we start with action and character, which is always an excellent place to start.

Second draft, page one:

(You’ll notice I decided not to adjust the title.  That happens, too.)

The second draft ended up being just a couple of hundred words longer than the first draft.  I’m getting this thing critiqued by some very good writers this week, and I wanted it to be the very best it could before I made anyone else read it — I learn more that way, if I fix the mistakes I know are there first, then move on to the mistakes I don’t know are there.  I expect to go through another round of revisions based on their reactions — did they have the reading experience I wanted them to have?  Did the story mean what I wanted it to mean?  No?  Well then, those are changes I’ll have to make.  I can already spot some niggling details that need changing…

Then, I hope to get this to market and maybe give y’all some good news about where you can read the rest of it.

What did I learn?  Paintings can do things real clothes can’t, like have skintight sleeves.  Artists painting a gown never have to figure out how the gown actually gets put on.  So there’s always going to be some compromises, constructing a gown based on a painting.  This was never going to look exactly like the painting — because I’m not built like a Botticelli sylph. (Wearing a corset would have got me a little closer to that.)  Oddly enough, what this means is the gown ended up looking more historical — more like, say, a sixteenth century Italian gown — and less like a fantasy gown than the painting.  This means I will wear it to SCA events with impunity.  Of course there are things I would do differently, but all in all I’m quite pleased with how it came out — it fits, it looks impressive, it got many compliments.

Costume Con was great.  It’s the first con I’ve been to in ages where I wasn’t working.  I went to panels!  I wandered about aimlessly and talked to whomever I ran into!  I shopped!  Saturday was the SF&F masquerade — it was the first masquerade I’ve ever been to where master class entries outnumbered the journeymen and novice entries.  I was inspired through the whole day.

And rather than decide this was as big a project as I ever want to tackle and I’m done with ambitious dressmaking…  I bought a pattern for a Regency gown.  Because of course I did.

The plot. . .standard, and some of the details didn’t pass the refrigerator test. (Is your disbelief suspended until you get home to get a drink from the fridge?)  Heck, they didn’t pass the two second test.  So it’s best to skate as fast as possible through this thing.  Too bad most of the action scenes went on twice as long as they needed to.  That’s my big complaint.  And there was some really goofy science.  Cold fusion?  Really?  I do not think this means what you think it means…

But there also was a lot to love:  Peter Weller and Noel Clarke, for example.  Uhura speaking Klingon.  Pretty, pretty spaceships.  Some fan service in the climactic moment that I thought was marvelous, but some of my companions thought was goofy.  To say more would be a spoiler.  But did anyone but an old fan even get what was going on there?

Also, does it strike anyone else that the Enterprise is basically structurally unsound in its entirety?

HUGE SPOILER BELOW, WHERE I HAVE REWRITTEN A PORTION OF THE MOVIE IN MY HEAD BECAUSE I COULD:

There’s a moment in this movie where the story could have zigged instead of zagging — and I think I prefer the zig.  Like, what if Khan isn’t the bad guy?  This is an alternate timeline.  Things are different here.  What if old Spock tells new Spock this is the most horrible person ever — but before Spock can tell Kirk, Kirk has decided to give Khan a chance.  Kirk decides not to stun Khan on the bridge of the Vengeance.  Khan has been used and manipulated, and at this point he needs an ally — he’s planned on betraying Kirk, but has a change of heart because of the trust Kirk shows.  Because Admiral Marcus is the real bad guy who’s manipulated them both.  What if what if what if…  It’s a missed opportunity, I think.  The new Trek movies seem intent on rehashing old plot lines in shiny new ways (tribble cameo, anyone?).  Why not really make it alternate?  Really upend our expectations?

Anyway, that’s how I would have done it.

The Cormac novel is nearing completion.  At this stage I always hear Gold Leader saying “Almost there. . .”

What I’ve started calling the Ombria Gown is almost done.  I’m still figuring out how to do the partlet (the gauzy bit that covers the chest), but my SCA friend who made custom brooches for the bodice delivered them last night, so one way or another I’ll be at Costume Con on Saturday, all decked out.

I talk so much about revision, I’m going to put my money where my mouth is and do a post in the next week or so showing a page of a short story I just did a major revision on.  It’s got whole paragraphs deleted and rewritten and everything.

The July 2013 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction, including my story “The Art of Homecoming,” is now available in book stores, news stands, etc.  Look, Ma, I’m on the cover!

Paula Guran’s latest anthology After the End: Recent Apocalypses is due out soon.  It got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly and includes a reprint of “Amaryllis.”

GRRM announced the table of contents for his and Gardner Dozois’ upcoming anthology, Rogues, which I believe is due out this fall, and will contain a brand new story of mine, “Roaring Twenties.”  That’s a heck of a lineup.  I always love being included in anthologies that I probably would have bought anyway, even if I weren’t in them.

I’ve got a whole slew of short stories coming out this year — the avalanche has begun!

Longer Review:  Confession:  I haven’t read the book.  Mostly because it’s one of those books that everybody already knows what it’s about — the green light, Jazz Age excess, yadda yadda.  But I want to read it and I’ll do it soon, if nothing else than to see how much text the movie lifted for that incessant, droning, never-ending voiceover in the third act.

Another confession:  I mostly went for the clothes and music, because I am the person who wore a beaded flapper dress to the Hugo Awards at Worldcon in Reno.  These were great.  I got some Charleston.  That’s all I really wanted out of the movie.

Really, I enjoyed the movie immensely through the first two acts.  It was manic, energetic, full of beautiful scenery and beautiful people, with a driving pace that cohered well.  It even felt relevant, in these days of 1% v. 99% and discussions of superficiality and nihilism.  Now, if the move had actually had something to say about superficiality and nihilism, it would have been golden.  But then we got to the third act.

Holy cow did this movie fall apart in the third act.  Third acts are supposed to be culminations.  They’re supposed to be frenetic.  They’re supposed to be when all the pieces that have been put into play come together and the inevitable happens.  Movies, even quiet and thoughtful ones, even ones about people destroying themselves through bad decisions, are supposed to get more interesting in the third act.  This one, for all its manic energy and artfulness up to that point, screeched to a dead stop.  I swear to God, the argument in the Plaza went on for twenty minutes, and all any of us really wanted at that point was for someone to use that damned ice pick on somebody else.   It just went on, and on, and on, and on…we get Gatbsy’s back story like three different times, and every argument gets rehashed like five times, and we get to see the [spoiler] from like three different camera angles, at three different times.

Holy crap somebody take an ax to this thing!

We also decided that The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick, two Great American Novels, are actually the same story — the passionate, all-consuming search for an elusive, destructive creature.  So I drew a picture of a sperm whale wearing a flapper dress.

So here are some links to keep you busy.  In my review I mentioned two big tropes that Iron Man 3 subverted, or at least played with with a tremendous amount of self-awareness and panache, making the film pretty darned smart to my English major eyes.  Other people are talking about them, too.

“How Iron Man 3 Flipped the Script on Female Characters”

and

“Why The Mandarin Needed to Be Portrayed as He Was in Iron Man 3″

Pay attention to what you like.  I remember drinking cabernet and chardonnay because that’s what everyone drank, until one day I realized they don’t taste good.  Zinfindel and pinot grigio for me!  Also, merlot, riesling, malbec, shiraz…

If you order a bottle at a restaurant that you really like, take a picture of the label so you’ll remember it.

Ordering wine off a menu takes practice.  But if you can do it with confidence, you’ll impress everyone at the table.

When the waiter pours you a taste from the bottle you ordered, you don’t have to stare at it and sniff it and swirl it around and pretend like that’s telling you anything.  Just take a taste to make sure the bottle isn’t off.

Learn to use a waiter’s corkscrew.  Not just because it’s a good skill to have, but because it also impresses the heck out of people.

Discriminating against a certain region makes you look like an ass.  However, promoting a favorite region makes you look educated and cosmopolitan.  For example:  you can’t go wrong with Oregon whites or Australian reds.

Plastic corks:  okay.  Screw-tops:  also okay.  It’s a brave new world out there.  (Though it can be embarrassing when you try to open a bottle with a corkscrew and then realize it’s a screw top.)

More as I think of them…

I’m fourteen years old and reading my favorite comic book.  That’s what it’s like.

Redacted spoiler!  No really, this is a big one:  As my friend said, it’s like they tried to stuff Pepper in the fridge.  But then Pepper ripped the door off and beat the shit out of the bad guys with it.  Yeah, it’s like that.

One of the nerdiest debates you can get involved in is about what order you should watch the Star Wars movies.  Release order, episode order (decried because it ruins the surprise of who Luke’s father is), or no prequels at all.  Then there are some more creative reorderings.  Last weekend a group of us sat down to test out the highly-regarded Machete Order.  (This link goes to a long post, but it’s worth it if you have any interest at all in reading a well-articulated discussion about Star Wars and the joys and problems of its film incarnations.)

Machete Order is this:  Episodes IV, V, II, III, VI.

Shocking, the first time you see it, isn’t it?  You watch IV and V, then break for a huge flashback about how everything got this way, then get the grand finale.  And you skip Episode I entirely.  For an orthodox fan like myself, skipping Episode I has the great benefits of leaving out Qui Gon, who doesn’t really have an impact on the rest of the story; leaving out midichlorians, which fill so many of us with a burning rage; skipping most of Jar Jar, because of course; and leaving out 8-year old Anakin, which means you don’t spend the rest of the movies trying to ignore the fact that Padme started out as Anakin’s babysitter and there’s this faint inappropriateness about their entire relationship.  So we all totally wanted to give this a try, coming to it with as clear and open minds as we could manage.  How did it go?

My biggest conclusion?  You don’t even need Episode II.  Just slide straight into Episode III and save yourself a couple of hours.  I’ll get to that in a second, after a couple of other thoughts.

It was the hardest thing in the world, not immediately putting on Return of the Jedi after Empire.  I had to physically restrain myself from reaching for the Jedi DVD rather than Attack of the Clones.  I’ve gotten to a point where IV, V, and VI all feel like one movie to me.  Breaking that habit was hard.

It’s so interesting to me as a writer that Episode I really is superfluous.  It’s a prologue and little more.  Darth Maul never gets mentioned again, Qui Gon barely gets mentioned again.  Pretty much nothing that happens has an impact on the rest of the series, except it moves a few pieces around to get them into position for later events.  Why not just start with those pieces in the right place to begin with?

Turns out, the same is true of Attack of the Clones.  I hadn’t seen this in ten years so coming to it fresh was interesting, because I got to really study it this time.  And it’s also just moving pieces around, and nothing the characters do has an impact on the later story.  The best thing in it is the giant Jedi battle — but that gets drowned out by the giant, messy droid v. clone trooper battle that happens right after.  Sound and fury, man — you know the rest of the quote.  Also, the Anakin/Padme relationship is totally creepy in this one.  He’s a clingy stalker kid — and then she just decides to fall in love with him for no particular reason.  WTF?

Revenge of the Sith pretty much reiterates everything that happened in Attack of the Clones.  Separatists, check.  Droid army, check.  Clone army, check.  Conspiracy, check.  Anakin filled with ambition and rage, check.  But if you start with Revenge of the Sith, you don’t have to try to forget about how creepy the Anakin/Padme thing has been up until now.  They’re just two people in love and you buy it and it’s great.  Also, the battle above Coruscant really is one of the most impressive set pieces in the series.  Think about the cliffhanger of Empire, flowing into that — ooh, yeah.  It says, “You thought the war between the Rebel Alliance and Empire was bad?  This is what the war to try to save the Republic looked like.”

The very worst thing about just watching Revenge of the Sith:  Padme does absolutely nothing in this movie but sit in her room and brush her hair.  Seriously.  It’s so frakking aggravating.

My second biggest conclusion is the prequel movies suffer from being watched in close proximity to the originals (in my humble opinion).  Take the big battle on Geonosis at the end of Clones.  Compare that to the Battle of Hoth.  The Battle of Hoth has story — impossible odds, damn scary walkers.  You see the faces of the people involved, the desperation of the Rebel soldiers holding the line, the grim satisfaction of General Veers in the AT-AT.  Compared to that, Geonosis is little more than someone smashing a bunch of toys together.  The charm of Han and Leia bantering in Empire versus Anakin creeping on Padme all the way through Clones.  The fact that the prequels have so many scenes of people sitting around talking.  A measurable percentage of these movies is people sitting around explaining the plot.  Near as I can figure, the original trilogy has maybe 4 “sitting and talking” scenes — three of them briefings before battles, plus the scenes in the Death Star in Ep. IV, which don’t really count because Vader gets to Force choke someone, which is ever so exciting, isn’t it?  Putting these movies in such close proximity only highlights the weaknesses of the prequels, I’m afraid.

The best part of Machete Order is seeing the creation of Vader in Ep. III, then the opening scene in Ep. VI with Vader marching down the ramp of the Imperial shuttle.  It’s striking, chilling, and very cool.

So there we are.  Carrie Version:  IV, V, III, VI.  If you’re an orthodox fan who wants some kind of prequel experience without being driven insane by all the things in the prequels that piss you off, this gives you just enough of the whole Anakin/Padme relationship and formation of the Empire and death of the Jedi order to fill in the backstory of the original trilogy.

In 1998 I attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop and I give it and its director Jeanne Cavelos a lot of credit for kicking my ass and helping me get my first sales.  The two most important things I learned at Odyssey:

Plot 

This isn’t so much what the story is about.  This is about how the story is structured to pull the reader through it.  To make sure that there’s something in the story — a question raised, suspense created — that means readers won’t stop once they start.  This is also about the “so what” factor.  What’s important about this story, why am I writing it, and how can I get that across?  Why should the reader care?  Turns out, this is one of the things that separates good stories from “meh” stories, and great stories from the merely good.  At Odyssey, Jeanne made me analyze some Ray Bradbury stories for plot.  It turns out, even stories where nothing much happens can have plot.  This was a revelation.

Revision

I write shitty first drafts.  Turns out, I’d been submitting shitty first drafts for ten years.  Now, I know there are some vocal proponents out there of the “don’t rewrite” philosophy.  People who feel that revising kills stories, or who cling to that step in Heinlein’s Rules — “You must refrain from rewriting, except to editorial order.”  Well, you have to actually catch an editor’s attention before you’ll ever get an editorial order, and you’re not going to do that with a shitty first draft.  Odyssey prompted me to revise stories for the first time — really revise, take them apart, rewrite them from scratch.  My last week at the workshop, Jeanne said these magic words:  “Your revisions are so much better.”  And they are.

For me, learning to revise involved looking at my stories from the reader’s point of view, and realizing that what I had on the page, or what I thought I had on the page, was not what my readers were getting.  I wasn’t making myself clear.  I wasn’t getting across the story in the best way possible.  The first draft is the brain dump, getting down the ideas and scenes and structure and heart.  The second draft is making sure it all makes sense to the reader.  The good news is, over time I’ve internalized a lot of revision techniques.  I no longer have to cut the first five pages of every story because I’ve learned to just start writing later instead of messing around with unnecessary early stuff.  Experience has taught me how to get a lot of this right on the first draft.  But I still ask a lot of questions of my writing and I still work hard at looking at it fresh, as a new reader.

Most editors have a choice — publish the story that’s already great, rather than try to work with a story that’s only kinda good but has potential.  In close to 70 short story sales, I can count on my hands the number of times I’ve gotten “editorial orders.”  Might as well make that story great before sending it out, yeah?

I made my first pro sale less than a year after attending Odyssey.  But I wasn’t finished learning.  Here’s the big one, I think.  The one that took years to learn.  The one I have no idea how to explain.

Voice

Voice is confidence.  It’s personality.  Voice convinces the reader you know what the hell you’re talking about.  Voice makes it real.  Perfectly clear, yeah?

Voice is also a matter of taste.  To me, writers like Toni Morrison and Peter Beagle just sing.  But I know they don’t do that for everyone.  You are never going to appeal to absolutely everyone with your writing.  You will drive yourself mad trying.  This is why we talk about finding your voice.  Because that’s what you have that no other writer has, and you’re not going to make anyone happy, least of all yourself, if you’re writing to fill some external mold.

Kitty taught me a lot about voice.  That character is so well defined, so chatty, so vivid — I have to be confident when I’m writing her.  I have to be absolutely sure what’s going on with her, all the time, and then get that across.  In the course of writing about her, I’ve been able to bring that confidence to a lot of my other stories.  It’s kind of like jumping into the deep end and just knowing I can swim.

My stories don’t all have the same specific “voice,” I think.  My World War II stories necessarily sound different from my stories set in the Renaissance, or the contemporary urban fantasy stories.  But I also think they’re all identifiably mine.  There’s a quality to the language and characters that comes out of experience, practice, my own philosophies, and over time has turned into a spine that goes through all my writing.

“Voice” was never something I worked on or practiced.  It happened over time.  I’m still learning, still getting better, and recently my writing seems to have taken another major step forward — some of the best short stories I’ve ever written I’ve done in the last couple of years (and this is after getting the Hugo nomination).  (Seriously — I’ve got some great stuff coming up, I can’t wait to show you all.)  I was thinking about why that’s happened, and I think a lot of it has to do with voice.  Having something to say, and being able to nail that down in a story with confidence.  And really, that’s only come after twenty years of working hard, and working hard at getting better.

I’m trying to put together a workshop/lecture about voice.  But I also wonder if it’s one of those things that has to come with time and experience.  However it happens, I think it’s important, because it separates the stories you remember and the authors you go back to over and over again, from the ones you don’t.