Arctic Light

I have this vague plot idea that involves a strategically important island intermediate between two bigger land masses that are experiencing escalating tensions. (It could also be a small country between two bigger countries, but I'd rather have it be an island for various reasons of plot and also because I want to have my own island, damn it.)

This is going to sound completely ridiculous because the project is still so unformed that I have total carte blanche to do whatever I want with the geography, but I'm having trouble coming up with ideas for why this little island, or country, would be important enough that it would be pivotal and have large nations fighting over control of it. I'm thinking I'd rather have it be something to do with location rather than ancestral land claims or a particular resource that's on the island (the story involves politics and spies and stuff like that) -- but I'm drawing a blank on good ideas for how to set up the geography so that it works out that way, or, for that matter, real-world examples to use as a model. Most of the ones I can come up with are ports occupying a bottleneck point, like Istanbul or various river-mouth port cities. I can't think of anything to do with strategically important, oft-fought-over islands. Cyprus as about the closest thing I can come up with to something vaguely similar to what I'm thinking of, although as I understand it, that's more of a land-claim issue and less of a strategic-location issue (not that I am well educated on Cyprus).

Do any of my history- or geography-minded flistees have any thoughts on this? Suggestions for historical examples I might look at? I'm sure I'm being stupid and overlooking all sorts of real-world examples, since people fighting over islands is NOT A RARE THING, but I'm blanking on ones that are similar to what I want to write. Maybe it's just that I'm defining my terms too narrowly.

There's something I forgot to say in my earlier post talking about AUs, which specifically applies to the difference between fanfic AUs and original fiction of whatever stripe. Fanfic AUs throw a really wonderful element of character incongruity into the mix. That is, you end up with space adventures or epic fantasy or rom-coms in which the characters are really not the type of people who tend to be in those kinds of stories. And that's wonderful! I think that's honestly one of the things I love most about AUs, and it's something that I keep making a mental note to apply as much as possible to my original fiction. It's one of the reasons, I think, that fanfic AUs can be so much livelier and more original-feeling than a lot of published genre fiction -- because, when you go to create a fantasy or urban fantasy or space opera or whatever from the ground up, it's really hard to think outside the box and not go straight to the fresh-faced farm boy and tomboyish princess in disguise, or whatever. Your character may (hopefully will) eventually evolve beyond the stereotype, but it's difficult not to do that in the initial planning stages without even thinking about it.

Although I've thought about this before, what got me thinking about it today was answering older comments on my "White Collar IN SPACE!" AU, and one of the comments was speculating on Elizabeth's role in the AU: she could be an event planner for spaceship galas! And I thought, wow, how cool and original is that? I've read a ton of sci-fi, but I've never seen anything like that. I'm not sure if I would read a contemporary novel about an event planner, but I would totally read a novel about a space event planner. (Or write one!)

But you get that a lot in fanfic AUs, because you start off with a cast of characters who are typical cop-show characters, or sci-fi spaceship show characters ... and THEN you stick them into a whole different genre, so suddenly they are space explorer types running a coffee shop, or cop-show characters as the police force in a fantasy land. I wish there was more of that kind of thing in original fiction, though you do get some genre crossover (murder mysteries in a space setting, for example).

Anyway, since I'm still working out my slate of things to write in 2014 - help me brainstorm, flist! Spaceship marines, doctors, and emotionally constipated smugglers are a dime a dozen in sci-fi. One of the things I really loved about Zenna Henderson's 1960s SF books and short stories is that she often wrote about stay-at-home moms and kids, which is something you hardly ever saw in sci-fi of that era. What else don't you see in sci-fi or fantasy? What would you like to see? Throw ideas at me -- what are some occupations/social roles you don't really ever see in spec fic? (Space event planner!) On the flip side, it'd also be interesting to hear which occupations/character types are so common in sci-fi/fantasy/urban fantasy that you're getting tired of them! (Space marines, anyone?) Flist: go! :D

I have an ebook out today, published by Dreamspinner Press!



Here is the blurb from Dreamspinner Press's website:
For twenty years, Owen Fortescue, a down-to-earth farmer in upstate New York, has had an on-again, off-again relationship with volatile New York City artist Kerry Ruehling. Now that same-sex marriage is recognized in New York, Owen wants to tie the knot. But Kerry responds to the proposal with instant, angry withdrawal. Owen resolves to prove to Kerry that, regardless of the way his family of origin has treated him, family ties don’t necessarily tie a man down. With help from his grown daughter, Laura, who loves them both, Owen hopes to convince Kerry that his marriage proposal isn’t a trap, but a chance at real love.

If that sounds interesting to you, here are some places you can buy it:

Dreamspinner Press | Amazon | Barnes & Noble

And here's my first review! http://madisonparklove.com/book-rec-homespun-by-layla-m-wier/

Today I'm having a release party on Dreamspinner Press's blog. I'll be giving things away, talking about fiber crafting, posting pictures of autumn scenery and other stuff.

However, PLEASE don't feel like you have to buy the book merely on my account! If it looks interesting, perhaps you'd like to read it. If not, that's totally cool too!

I can't remember if I've mentioned this here before, but I have a relatively new romance-writer blog: http://laylawier.wordpress.com. (I don't post there a whole lot, but if you want to keep up with my non-fannish writing, it's a place to occasionally check out.) There are LJ and DW feeds for it: laylawier_feed and laylawier. (The feeds don't use cuts, however, so some posts may be long or contain a lot of pictures.)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled fangirling. :)

ETA: Please note there are now book spoilers in the LJ comments!

I ran across an interesting link today on how/whether to write about periods (as in, women having them):

http://madelineashby.com/?p=1492
(detailed discussion of bodily fluids, as one might expect)

( Some more discussion - nothing gross or TMI, but cut if you don't particularly care for the topic )

What do you think? Have you ever mentioned it in a story yourself, or seen it done well? Would you write it? Is there a scenario you think is usually done poorly that could be done better?

... to White Collar writers, or anyone who's writing something that involves prison visits. I stumbled across this while looking up New York prison visitor policies (... it's for fiction, I swear) -- a blogger's detailed account of visiting her boyfriend at Manhattan Detention Center. Lots of information that you can't get from just reading the visitor policies, like how the strip searches are handled and where the waiting area is relative to the visiting area.

veleda_k is having a Neal/Sara Thing-a-thon (fic, art, squee, etc): here on LJ / here on Dreamwidth. Go leave prompts, answer prompts, or squee! (Season four spoilers are inevitable.)

trobadora is thinking about doing a Vorkosigan series reread & discussion. Interested? Tell her so!

On a (somewhat) different topic, I just read an interesting article by a woman who ghostwrote Sweet Valley High books. (My sister used to read those! Well, actually I think hers were Sweet Valley Twins, but the same series, basically ...) Her essay is interesting to me partly just for the process, because I don't think I ever knew how those kids' adventure serial books are done, and partly because some of her fears as a writer -- running out of words before she gets to what she really wants to write, or picking up bad habits by writing bad fiction -- are things I can relate to.

In the end, though, it's kind of odd to me how, after talking about how much fun she had writing these books and how much her audience of young teenagers loved them, she falls right back into the exact mentality that makes so much literary fiction unreadable for me. The Sweet Valley books, she decides, must be terrible because they're happy, fun wish fulfillment, and she eventually gives it up to write "real" books. To which I say, pfeh. I mean, yes, I can relate to the feeling of getting tired of writing fluff and wanting to give something heavier and more complicated a try, and in her case, specifically, she can't take credit and she's not writing her own stories -- I can certainly see moving on to something more creatively interesting. I just feel like she ended up with entirely the wrong "lesson" from her experiences. After she talks about how fun and effortless it was to write the Sweet Valley High books, it's a little jarring to discover that she ends up believing that this is how she knows they're "bad" -- because writing is supposed to be slow and painful and hard.

Now I'm not going to tell anyone they can't wallow in their Garret of Misery if they want to, but this is EXACTLY the reason (I believe) that so many teenagers give up reading, and so many people who have stories in them never manage to write them down: the belief that Art is Hard, and Art is Depressing, and anything that is fun and playful to read or to write must be trash. But I've climbed on this soapbox before, and I know I'm preaching to the choir around here anyway.

ETA: Oh, I forgot this awesome astronomically-themed sampler from Georgian England. Well, it's awesome and kind of sad too, especially since it's abandoned with only a few stitches, which really makes you wonder what the story was. Of course, everyone involved is long dead, so we'll never know ...

I got back from my travels to find a big box of BOOKS waiting for me! MY BOOK!

All the information on what it is, how to sample it and buy it and so forth is on my author blog:

Wordpress | Livejournal | Dreamwidth

Hi flist! There are two scenes in my original novel that involve one character teaching another one some basic swordfighting moves, and I am trying to find someone who knows something about practical combat who can look over them for me and tell me if I am making any really stupid mistakes. It's a tricky thing to research because it's not any specific swordfighting school and it involves a magic sword that does a lot of the work for you, and the person who's learning to use it will be wielding it against magical monsters rather than other people with swords. So it's sort of a combination of "here are some basic stabby things to do with a sword" and "staying alive in a fight 101". Level of real-world plausibility, on a scale of one to 10, is probably about a 3. *g* But I would like, if possible, to avoid giving the impression that this scene was written by a person who knows absolutely nothing about fighting.

I asked some questions about these scenes a year or so ago, when I was originally writing the rough draft of the novel, so I know there is one person who reads my journal (or used to) who has some pretty solid swordfighting knowledge (and gave me extremely useful feedback on the original post!), but I don't know how to contact you because you're anon. I'm not fishing for that specific person, necessarily, but for anyone who would be willing to review two fight-training scenes which are cumulatively about 2000 words and give me feedback on their general plausibility.

Please email me if you can help: - layla at ravenschildren dot com.

ETA: I think I'm pretty well hooked up! Thank you guys SO much!

I got contacted about being a Nielson (TV ratings) household for the week of May 17-24. Lovely - a week during which I will almost certainly be watching no TV, because everything is on hiatus! :/ Why couldn't it have been a couple weeks earlier? Any shows which I might be watching at that point will almost certainly be either from Netflix or streaming on the networks' websites (which is how I'm watching Legend of Korra). Husband points out that sending back a booklet that says "no TV watched for the whole week" sends a message all its own, which is certainly true, but STILL. Next time please call me in the winter, Nielson people!

In other news, thank you, guys, for the help on plotting the zombie story. I still don't have an ending, but I have lots of ideas. :D On a fanficcy note, I am completely stuck on the dragon!Neal story, even though I'm only a couple of chapters from the end. I know how the very end is going to go -- I've known all along -- but there is a really big thing that I can't figure out, and this is why it's been stalled for a couple of months.

( If you're reading the dragon!Neal story and would like more of it, help me brainstorm! )

I started reading "Grass" by Sheri S. Tepper last night, and it is so good! I've bounced off Tepper's novels in the past -- finding them dense, depressing and unengaging -- but maybe I just tried mediocre ones, or maybe I wasn't in the right mental place for them. I was at the library yesterday, though, and figured that if I can't get into one of her most famous novels, then I'll never manage to do it at all -- but so far I'm loving it, and I'm totally caught up in the slowly unraveling mystery and the characters' troubled, complex lives. (If you've read it, please don't spoil me! I'm having a lot of fun not having a clue what will happen next!)

Most of what I've been reading lately (aside from fanfic) has been nonfiction, novels I've read before, or the newest books in various series that I'm already following. It's been awhile since I've experienced the delight of being introduced to an entirely new set of characters and a brand new world, and getting to slowly discover it. (ETA: Er, in book form, anyway. Kinda forgot about Homestuck. *facepalm*)

This is why, as much as I love fanfic, I can't even imagine reading nothing but fanfic for any length of time. Even though some fanfic is excellently written, and the best fanfic explores the familiar in new, interesting ways, it's still a riff on familiar themes and characters. The characters are known, and very few writers take them very far outside their canonical relationships and characterizations ... which, besides, is not what I go to fanfic for -- except in rare cases, it's more of the characters that I want; I'm not really interested in having canon completely uprooted and reading about OCs with the characters' faces. It's the familiarity that I go to fanfic (or sequels) for -- the coziness of snuggling up with familiar characters, and having at least a reasonable expectation that things will turn out okay.

But one of the delights of original fiction is getting to know a new cast of characters, and sussing out all their many and varied undercurrents, the things they say and the things they don't say, having each of them go from being a total unknown to something a little more familiar. It stretches your brain a little bit, in new and interesting ways -- like going to a brand-new town for the first time, rather than just going to your favorite places (or even exploring a new neighborhood) in a familiar town.

I recently read this post by Jo Walton aka papersky on the "long spear" metaphor in writing: in order for a spearpoint to hit you (that is, in order to get the full emotional impact of a scene), it has to have the whole spear behind it. It got me to thinking that this is actually one of the big things that fanfic can potentially deliver for us, as fanfic readers but especially as writers, that original fiction can't -- you can skip straight to the payoff (the heroic sacrifice, the kiss, the moment of emotional truth) without having to write 400 pages of buildup beforehand. And I really appreciate that about fanfic! Sometimes I just want the payoff.

But in a good writer's hands, the buildup is anything but dull ... the slow exploration of the characters and world, the careful laying of clues, the ratcheting of tension. I am having loads of fun exploring the planet Grass along with the characters: learning about the world, being creeped out by the sense of the unknown, and wondering how many of the characters will make it out alive.