Reading update

My latest "appointment television" show is HBO's A Game of Thrones. I watched the first episode simply because as a fantasy fan I was glad to see a network take the genre seriously and attempt to make quality TV from it. By the second episode I was so hooked I had to read the books too, and I'm still trying to figure out how, as a fan of Jacqueline Carey, Guy Gavriel Kay, and Lois McMaster Bujold, I hadn't noticed them before.



I'm about halfway through Book Three, A Storm of Swords, now. This is fantasy at its best, for sure, epic and high-stakes but above all human. There's some magic, walking dead, dragons, and strange gods, but it's the honor and ambition, loyalty and betrayal, hope and horror, that keep me coming back for more. That said, I have a love/hate relationship with the fact that unlike a lot of fantasy novels, you can't count on the good staying good, the evil staying straightforwardly bad, and the most appealing characters staying alive. It's realistic, and it adds an unusual amount of suspense to the reading experience, but I wish I could trust that, say, Arya and Danaerys will both stay A) alive and B) appealing enough that I'll continue to WANT them alive. I don't always want to be quite this harrowed by my leisure reading. But on the other other hand, when a character does something awesome and heroic, it's all the more thrilling when you're half expecting them to chicken out or choose the dark side, as it were.



My goal is to catch up on the series in time for A Dance With Dragons' release in July, but I'm finding I need a palate cleanser or two between books. Last week I read Kathleen Eagle's In Care of Sam Beaudry. I'm not generally a fan of small-town contemporary romances, since they often seem to carry the implicit or even explicit assumption that small towns are BETTER than cities. As someone who grew up in a small town but went to college in Philadelphia and am raising a family in Seattle, I just can't relate. But Eagle's books aren't like that. Her small town, rural, and Indian reservation settings come across as not better than my world, but fascinatingly different. And I go to books for different.



In my research reading, I just finished Richard Holmes' Redcoat: The British Soldier in the Age of Horse and Musket. It's an overview of all aspects of life in the British army roughly 1750-1850. For me it was mostly a review of what I learned researching The Sergeant's Lady, but a most useful review on points where I'd grown rusty, since both my current manuscripts have an army setting. It's readable and well-researched, and I'd recommend it to any author looking to write a military setting or hero of its era.

Six Sentence Sunday 5-29-11

This week at last we're back in my historical fantasy, Wolf & Huntress. Cass Macdonald, our heroine, is remembering an incident from when she was thirteen and in the middle of the night sneaked out of the lodgings she shared with her sister and grandfather:

Grandda had been waiting for her when she climbed back in through the window just before dawn. Before she could think of an explanation, he’d slapped her hard across the face. “Just what were you thinking you were about, foolish lass?”

“I was hunting vampires,” she said stoutly. “And I was killing three of them.”

“Hunting vampires by yourself?”

Comments and feedback always welcome, and check out other authors' excerpts at the Six Sentence Sunday blog.

Long weekends and the perfectionist

In celebration of the first long weekend of the summer, I'd like to talk about how an overscheduled perfectionist like myself looks at a three-day weekend.

Somewhere around Thursday I realized it was in fact about to be Memorial Day weekend. (It's been unseasonably cold here in Seattle, you see, so it feels more like March than late May. This keeps throwing my mental calendar off, making me feel, for example, that I have a lot more time before RWA National then just a month.)

I thought, “Wow! A three-day weekend! Think of all the things I could get done!” I began making a list in my head. It looked something like this:

-I could clean the whole house and make it so immaculate that my mother would smile down from heaven and think, “At last my daughter has learned to be a good housekeeper. I knew someday she'd live up to my standards.”

-I could read every word of A Storm of Swords. That's the whole thing, beginning to end, all 1128 pages of it.

-Mr. Fraser and I could actually finish stripping the wallpaper from the entry wall, pick a paint color, and start painting the halls.

-I could bake cookies! Miss Fraser would love that.

-I could get so much writing done. I could do 3000-4000 words per day.

-I could work on blog content for the next month or so and get it all cued up and ready to post automatically over the next few weeks.

-I could go through the boxes in the garage and decide what to keep, donate, or throw out.

-I could actually try out some of the recipes from the Once-a-Month Cooking websites and cookbooks and have myself all set up with meals to reheat on busy nights.

-I could go to Nordstrom's. They're having a sale, and I really need to replace my everyday work shoes that are falling apart and get a piece or two more to round out my RWA wardrobe, seeing as how realizing it's Memorial Day meant realizing it's just a month till National.

-I could go car shopping, since our '99 Mazda is on its last legs.

All of those are worthy goals. And if I had, say, two whole weeks off instead of just three days, I could do them all. But my instinct is to try to do EVERYTHING, and then to feel like a failure when I've only managed to clean the den and one bathroom, write 4000 words total, and read maybe half of my long book of choice.

I have a funny attitude toward time. Give me a very small chunk of it, say half an hour before I need to go pick up Miss Fraser from a play date, and I feel like it's useless to do anything and fritter it away on something like iPhone Scrabble. Never mind that I could read a chapter or two of a book, load the dishwasher and take out the recycling, or catch up on email--half an hour just feels to short to be useful. This is what keeps me from being productive many weekday evenings and on days at work when I have a lot of meetings. My motivation tends to collapse in the absence of long, uninterrupted blocks of time.

But give me a whole day, or a long weekend, and the opposite is the case. I think of many things I might do over three days and feel like I should be able to do all of them. Then come Monday morning I'm all dissatisfied with how my weekend flew by and how little I got done.

I'm trying to do better this weekend. My writing goal is simply to make productive use of the windows of uninterrupted time each day when my daughter gets her two afternoon hours on the computer. (Mr. Fraser just taught her to play Minecraft, and she's wholly hooked.) I'll probably sit down tonight, make a list of my fit-for-Nationals wardrobe pieces, and plan a shopping trip for tomorrow. I may test-drive a Sonata, the current front-runner for the new car. I'll try to do a little extra housework atop the bare minimum of laundry and dishes that have to happen. And I may get to page 500 on A Storm of Swords. Really, that's plenty for three days.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: No Title for You!

Today I'm going to focus on the critical role of legitimacy in determining who can and can't inherit a title.

Legitimacy in this case cannot be conferred retroactively, and is based on one's parents' marital status at one's birth, not conception. If a duke marries his pregnant mistress as she's going into labor, the child (if a son!) can inherit as long as the vicar completes the ceremony before the birth. If they marry when the infant is a few hours old, that baby is out of luck. This is one of the most common fictional errors with respect to titles and inheritance--a peer legitimizing a bastard son or grandson. Couldn't happen. The law made no provision for it.

A case in point is Wellington's oldest brother Richard. As a young man, he took up with a French actress, with whom he had five children...and only afterward married her. The fact that he eventually married their mother did nothing whatsoever to confer legitimacy upon those children. It probably made them more socially acceptable--both of the daughters made reasonably good marriages, one to a baron, the other first to a baronet and second to the younger son of a duke. But there was no way the eldest son could inherit his father's titles. Once illegitimate, always illegitimate.

Richard Wellesley held two titles: that of Earl of Mornington, which he'd inherited from his father, and Marquess Wellesley, granted for his services as Governor-General of India at the end of the 18th century. Upon his death, the latter title became extinct, since he had no legitimate sons to pass it on to. But since the Mornington title came from his father, it did not die out but went to Richard's brother, William, second oldest of the family, and then to his son and grandson. At that point, in 1863, William's direct male line died out, and the earldom passed to the descendants of the third Wellesley brother, Wellington himself. And there it remains to this day--as mentioned a few weeks ago, the eldest son of the eldest son of the present Duke of Wellington uses Earl of Mornington as his courtesy title.

Six Sentence Sunday 5-22-11

I finished the rough draft of my novella, Jane's Second Soldier, on Friday, and I'll be setting it aside for at least several weeks. I know it's not ready to submit as it stands, and I need some space before I can decide how much work it needs and whether I'm willing to commit to it.

Now I'm working on both my historical fantasy, Wolf & Huntress, and a new historical romance whose working title is The General's Mouse. Since none of the new sections from W&H made a nice SSS post, I'm posting the first six sentences of my newest manuscript. It's January 1815, and the scene is on a Royal Navy frigate returning from North America. They've just met a ship bound in the opposite direction bearing news of the treaty ending the War of 1812. My hero, a young general whose entire career has been based on his prowess at war, isn't sure what to think of peace:

-----

“To peace!”

Dutifully Jack lifted his glass. “To peace,” he echoed, along with the rest of the officers dining at Captain Tizley’s table.

How many of them truly want peace? Jack wondered as he downed his wine. He couldn’t honestly say he did. After the debacle at Plattsburgh, he had intended to plead with Horse Guards for an independent command.

-----

Comments and feedback always appreciated (keeping in mind that this is the rough draft of something I just started yesterday!). And visit the Six Sunday blog to view other authors' contributions.

Time management for perfectionists

I started writing seriously in 2001, three years before my daughter's birth, but I really got into a good rhythm during the almost two years I stayed home with her after she was born. She was that rarest of infants, a good sleeper. She slept through the night from the time she was two months old, and would've done so earlier had the doctor not said we needed to wake her up for a feeding. And she took reliable naps from 1:30-3:00 every afternoon, which just happens to be the time I feel most awake and alert. (Don't envy me too much, though. I was on bedrest for the last two months of my pregnancy and had a four-day induced labor, so I paid my dues.)

So I wrote during my daughter's naptime. It was perfect. No interruptions, a long enough time slot to produce a respectable daily word count, and plenty of time when my daughter was awake but not needing 100% of my attention for other writerly activities like research reading, networking, and critiquing.

But then family finances dictated that I go back to work. I suddenly had far less time for writing...and I discovered I'd never learned to manage my time properly before because I'd never needed to. For five years now I've been struggling to find just the right balance between writing, day job, and family. I don't have all the answers yet, but I'm going to be giving a workshop on what I've figured out at the Emerald City Writers Conference in October.

All along I've been fighting against a tendency to make overly ambitious plans for what I'll accomplish on any given lunch hour, evening, or weekend. Then, when I fail to meet my rigorous schedule or get seduced into reading just one more chapter or watching just one more inning when I'm supposed to put down the book or turn off the TV, I think, "Oh, well, I've blown it today. Might as well just quit." Sometimes I'll let this insidious brand of perfectionism derail a whole week. I'll have vowed to take the bus to work or write on my lunch hour or stay on Weight Watchers EVERY DAY. Monday and Tuesday go great. But on Wednesday I oversleep and have to drive in, or something comes up at work and I have to eat at my desk, or I get desperately hungry at 3 PM and buy a bag of chips...and I've blown the whole week. Might as well not even try on Thursday and Friday.

Deep down, I know this behavior is just as stupid as it sounds. Unfortunately, that doesn't stop me from doing it, again and again.

But I think I've finally found a solution. About a month ago I sat down and made a list of everything I want to do that I could in theory procrastinate or avoid. Some of them are writing related--the two daily writing sessions I strive to achieve, research reading, blogging. Others aren't--exercise, staying on Weight Watchers, bringing my lunch to work, and cooking in the evening rather than ordering pizza or Chinese, to name a few. I assigned them all point values and set up a spreadsheet. Every time I do something on the list, I give myself the allotted points. Then, when I accumulate 100 points, I reward myself.



So far I've earned two rewards and have given myself lunch at the delicious Indian place near my office, complete with gulab jamun for dessert, and bought myself a book off my wish list, Kathleen Eagle's In Care of Sam Beaudry, which I'm going to read between George RR Martin books to give myself a break from Westeros (which is awesome but exhausting). And if I make 500 points in a calendar month (which ain't gonna to happen in May), I get myself a bigger reward. I think my first one is going to be a Duke of Wellington miniature to go with the rifleman and redcoat already standing guard over the markers on my dry erase board at work.

The beauty of this system is that it keeps me from tripping over my own perfectionism. So, I didn't ride the bus on Tuesday. That's OK, when I ride it Wednesday, that's 2 points. So I didn't write on my lunch hour on Thursday. That's no reason not to write late at night after my daughter is asleep, nor to skip reading a chapter in my current research book or working on a blog post, because I can still salvage a good score for the day.



It's elaborate and, I admit, kinda strange. But it's working for me, so I put it out there for other overscheduled perfectionists.

Of Wimseys and Wellesleys: Dukes

This week we at last reach dukes, the highest rank short of royalty in the British peerage. (I'm going to leave royal dukes out of it, because A) the Wellington and Denver dukedoms that are the subject of this series aren't royal, and B) they're not generally an issue in fiction, because most authors of, say, Regency romances aren't going to create fictional royal dukes.)

The first thing you need to know about dukes is that they're rare. Currently there are only twenty-seven extant dukedoms in the British peerage (you can find a list of them here). To become a duke, in general you either needed to be an extraordinarily influential and powerful aristocrat...or else have the good fortune to be Charles II's bastard son. (He created the Dukedoms of Monmouth, Richmond, Lennox, Southampton, Grafton, and St Albans for his offspring.) The closest thing to merit-based dukedoms that I know of are Wellington and Marlborough, and it's not like the first holders of those titles were of anything approaching humble birth.

Dukes, being a cut above the rest of the peerage, are addressed differently. They are not called "my lord," and if you encounter a reference to "Lord Wellington" in a novel set during the Waterloo campaign (i.e. after he was granted his dukedom in 1814), the author missed that detail. If you someday have the chance to, say, travel in the TARDIS to observe the Battle of Waterloo (a fantasy of mine, I admit), you should address Wellington as "Your Grace," unless you feel yourself to be on familiar, equal terms with him, in which case "Duke" or "Wellington" would be appropriate. Or "sir," but in the "Yes, sir" sense, not the knightly one.