All the Windwracked Stars

Elizabeth Bear has posted the first there chapters of her new novel All the Windwracked Stars here.  On top of having one of the cooler covers (art by Jean-Sebastian Rossbach) and a fine title, I am finding it to be an intriguing read with definite echoes of the Norse mythos.  Not only does she avoid infodumping while achieving worldbuilding by dropping interesting hints, she manages to squeeze in an action scene in the first 3000 words.  I have yet to finish this preview, but I look forward to reading the entire novel.

The other day I received an email that a friend and fellow writer sent out to the AAAWG email list. It was about how one handles pacing in a novel. Initially I didn’t have a cogent answer, and I still don’t think I have a satisfactory answer, but I ended up by responding with this:

I’m afraid I don’t really know how to answer this question as I have approached it primarily by gut feel. Perhaps a more honest answer is that I have really ignored the question of pacing and just wrote the novel (or short story) with the assumption that it would work out as I went. One (implied) concession to pacing is that as I near the end of a major draft I read the story through as fast as I can (no edits) and see how it hangs together. I think one of the things I am trying to determine when I do these quick reads is to see if I have achieved a good pace. One of my stock questions to my beta-readers is about pacing and I rely on their less-biased feedback. You can also tell a lot about pacing by asking your beta-readers when they put your story down (or just give up) to do other things.
Anyways, that’s my pre-published opinion.

Anyone want to share their insight into pacing a novel?

How very cool! A noir novel by Roger Zelazny lost for thirty years to be published by Hard Case Crime. The Dead Man’s Brother is due out in Feb. of 2009. You can also check out an excerpt.

I was talking about SF novels with my friend Chris last night and the topic of old (at least for me) and obscure SF novels came up. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been working away at editing “The Alchemist of Liberty” and composing a two new scenes to be added to Tactics. Things are progressing a little faster than I had anticipated. Which means that I might be done with the third draft of Tactics by the end of October.

I met with Paul T. (my first alpha-reader for Tactics) last Friday after work and talked about, among other things, Tactics and “The Shaper’s Daughter”. He hasn’t read the “The Shaper’s Daughter” since I extracted it from the second draft of Tactics and polished it up with intent of turning it into a short story. In the process of converting it into a short story I added a frame to it (which some people have liked, and some haven’t), and I had Paul read just Prologue / Epilogue frame. I was gratified when he decided that he had to reread the story on the basis of the framing.