Rene Sears

Writing Update

Whew! The first draft of Queen of Storms is done and off to my wonderful beta readers. Yay!

This one took a bit longer to write and (especially) edit than I anticipated. A lot happens in this book, and it’s significantly longer than Strangehold and Sorrow’s Son. Despite having a fairly solid outline, there were some side quests that needed to be pruned out and redirected–My first draft was 90,000 words, which my first pass through reduced to 73,000, and the draft I sent to my beta readers is about 78,000. It always feels weird to cut out whole scenes and storylines and then patch over the holes, but the book is so much stronger for it. And it’ll be even stronger after my wonderful readers tell me what’s still missing.

If you recall the end of Sorrow’s Son, the gang was poised to go to Faerie.

I was (and am still) so excited about getting a closer look at Faerie, both the court and the wilder lands. I hope you will enjoy it too.

Reading

I have read so many wonderful books lately–I’m on a fantastic reading streak. A few highlights:

The Tea Master and the Detective by Aliette de Bodard is a genderbent homage to Sherlock Holmes, in which the part of Watson is played by a mindship, The Shadow’s Child. Long Chau wants The Shadow’s Child‘s help studying the effects of deep space on a body, but of course, the study leads to an investigation… I loved this. Set in de Bodard’s Xuya universe, so if you like it, there’s much more to read.

Matt Wallace’s Sin du Jour urban fantasy series about a catering company that serves supernatural creatures recently wrapped up with Taste of Wrath. I highly recommend this whole series. They’re novellas, so each individual book is short, but together they add up to one delightful, gonzo storyline.

I’ve heard so many wonderful things about Emma Newman’s Planetfall. And it turns out, I agree with them all. (I am still thinking about the ending and trying to decide how I feel about it.) The good news about being late to the party is book three just came out, so I have the next two to catch up.

Tess of the Road by Rachel Hartman is my most recent read, and oh man did I love this book. (I also loved her previous two, Seraphina and Shadow Scale.  This book is set in that same world–Tess is Seraphina’s half-sister–but I don’t think you need to have read the first two books to enjoy this one, though the connections will be richer if you do, of course.) This is a contemplative, internal book about a protagonist who doesn’t fit into her heavily patriarchal world coming to grips with all that has happened to her and been done to her, and the choices she made. It is not action-heavy at all, but I was rapt the whole time with Tess’s internal struggle.

When I was 13, a friend gave me the Earthsea trilogy for my birthday. There are some books you remember as turning points in your career as a reader, and the entire trilogy, but especially  A Wizard of Earthsea and The Tombs of Atuan, were that for me. I had always gravitated towards SFF, but these books really marked me. The world, the wizards, the forces of the Nameless dark and the power of naming one’s shadow, Ged’s and Tenar’s struggles with their own natures–these opened a door in me. There are books that touch a reader deeply, that make them consider the reader’s self and the world outside, that shape how one looks at the world.

The beauty of speculative fiction is that talking about the impossible, the improbable, shines a light on who we are in the real world, and who other people might be. An archipelago of other experiences is out there, every book a doorway, waiting for the reader to step through. Ursula Le Guin’s books were always islands of understanding as well as delight for me to fall into.

I can remember reading The Left Hand of Darkness a few years later, sitting in the cafeteria of my high school and reading through lunch as Genly and Estraven crossed the ice, and Genly’s understanding of Estraven and the world changed. I like to think stepping through that doorway helped me have understanding later on when my perception of people shifted.

The structure of Four Ways to Forgiveness blew me away when I first read it: four linked stories exploring two linked planets, where one people have enslaved another. It’s a meditation on betrayal and freedom and forgiveness, and how people change.

When I first decided I wanted to write seriously, it was to Le Guin’s Steering the Craft that I turned, working my way through every chapter and exercise in the book, a mentor in paper form.

My husband sent me the news of Le Guin’s death. When I opened the news on my phone, I said, “Oh, no” out loud, and my eyes started watering. I never met Le Guin, but she nonetheless had an enormous impact on what I read, and how I think about stories, and how I think about people. She was, of course, a storyteller of immense skill as well as an elegant wordsmith, but when I think now on her collected works, what strikes me is the compassionate note that rings through all her books, whether for a bitter Sparrowhawk who’s almost lost himself in hawk form, or for Solly and Teyeo as they discover there’s more to each other than they thought.

She produced an enormous body of work, and it comforts me that there are books of hers I’ve yet to read, as well as old favorites to revisit. Her books have always brought me greater understanding, since I was thirteen, and will continue to do so, whether it’s the first time I read them or the twelfth.

“We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel… is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin

I have been typing away furiously on Queen of Storms. I’m not technically doing NaNoWriMo “right,” because I had a significant chunk of Queen of Storms written already, but I wanted to ride on the collective creative power of all those other writers, so I’m doing it. I’m obfuscation there if you’re doing it and want to check in. It’s kind of fun getting little wordcount badges–that tiny ping of validation is a nice motivator.

Speaking of nice motivators, I’ve been using the website 4thewords.com as a way to get myself going with writing sessions. It’s writing made into a quest-style game, in which you defeat monsters by writing X amount of words in X amount of time. The timers are long enough (especially for big goals) that I can count my morning writing and my lunch writing toward the same creature. It’s been a great boost for me–instead of hitting my goal wordcount and quitting, I’ll tackle another monster or two. In each area of the game there are usually at least two choices of different amounts of wordcount to tackle, so if you only have limited time, you can aim small, or if you want to try for a bigger one you can go for it. Highly recommended if gamification works for you.