Okay, officially past the 100 000 word mark on the WIP now. The New Project is officially a doorstop (seeing as I am just about to tie up Part the First, and there's still at least as much story to come...)

And yes, debtaber, They Are Just About To Meet.

I don't want to rush the scene tonight so it will get written tomorrow. But it is about to get written.

Don't faint. [grin]

Finished a requested rewrite of one story. Just submitted another.

Wrote half a chapter more in the WIP. With a bit of luck the rest of the chapter will fall in line by the end of the week.

Still things on the To Do list which date from before LaunchPad (including - oh joy - a date with the dentist. Can't wait.)

September is going to be here before I know it and September will be hellish - I'll be at various conventions, conferences and events for a LOT of September, much travelling, much to-and-fro-ing, much planing and deplaning, much sleeping in hotels, argh.

October, another convention.

November, trip to California, another convention.

Then it's December. Christmas. Silly season.

And I SWORE I would have half this book at least written by the end of the year. Unh huh.

Lots of work to do. Gotta go. See you.

libba_bray SO nails it

Well, now. There's a review of "Embers of Heaven" by yours truly on this site

The reviewer calls the book "beautifully written" and "absorbing", and highly recommends it.

She gets the name of my heroine right, and even spells it correctly.

( However, we then run into a lot of trouble almost immediately. )

Don't get me wrong. I love getting my work praised.

But not when it's *someone else's book*...

We can haz Japan...? Or China? Or a mystical land called Syai?

Something?...

...here.

Responses? Suggestions? Urges to refute? Accolades?...

(I think #50 sums it up, really [grin])

Ever wondered what it means to call yourself a writer? Go read this.

There are times it seriously feels like two steps forward one step back. I wrote most of the current chapter and then looked at the scene I had just penned and went, unh, NAAAAAH. So I wiped 3/4 of the chapter and went back to where it started to go bad.

I finished the recalcitrant chapter today, and it's good now, MUCH better... except for one minor mingy little detail. I am not at the place where I was supposed to end this chapter. I'm at least another chapter away from that place.

Which plays meerry hob with the internal organization of this novel so far.

Sigh.

I guess reorganization later is the easy part. I should look on the bright side - I finished 5000+ good words today. A good chapter.

This is WORKING, dammit. It's just working slower and in a more convoluted manner than I would like it to be.

Well. Back to the grindstone tomorrow. I'll write those next necessary couple of thousand words and then we'll see where it all fits in. It's just that I am not where I wanted to be come the middle of the year...

There was a Q&A with her in a recent issue of TIME magazine which came to hand (the May 19 issue for those who want to track it down), and reading her initial responses, ye gads, it was scary - I was listening to myself.

But the thing that I really want to quote her on here on my blog. The question was pretty damned inane - it boiled down to the usual "What advice would you give to aspiring writers?"

Her answer:

The work is in the work itself. If [your daughter] writes a lot, that's good. If she revises a lot, that's even better. She should not only write about what she knows but about what she doesn't know. It extends the imagination.

It's like I've always said - fantasy isn't a sub-section of "literature" - the converse is true, ALL fiction is fantasy of one sort of another byt the simple virtue of not being true.

Huzzah for imagination. That's where fantasy lives.

Welcome to my world.

...but just so as to keep this place interesting, here's something to think about.

rdeck just forwarded me an interview from "Shelf Awareness" with an author called Tom Rob Smith. In case he is someone whose name you are not familiar with, here's his bio as it appears in the interview:

Tom Rob Smith was born in 1979 to a Swedish mother and an English father and
studied English Literature at Cambridge. He worked on Cambodia's
first-ever soap opera and wrote screenplays until he started work on
the novel Child 44, just published by Grand Central. Film rights have
been bought by Ridley Scott, and Richard Price will adapt the novel.

Amongst other things, he was asked what book he might want to read again for the first time.

His reply:

I know exactly what you mean by this question. You come to the end of
the book and you feel kind of sad, like you're saying goodbye to a
friend and you can't recapture that friendship by re-reading the
book, because that's almost like looking through a photo album rather
than re-living the experience.


Oh, I so know what he means.

There are books I would love to read again for the first time without knowing the things about them that I know now and did not know when I first touched them. I can never read the Narnia books again with the same kind of innocence with which I read them when I was a child and I did not know who C S Lewis was, what he believed, and what the subtext for those books (intended or not) is or was. I can never read again for the first time the book that I remember crying over when I first read it - in translation - and understood the power that words would always have over me ("My son, my son" by Howard Spring, for those who want to know).

So, over to you folks. What's the book that you carry on your heart?

...it's time to wrestle the current recalcitrant chapter into submission...

And DONE. And it's a GOOD chapter.

It isn't at all the chapter that I began with, to the extent that perhaps five paragraphs of that original chapter survive in this one, and even they are much changed and reshaped in order to fit into a new place. But nonetheless, the chapter is in the bag.

[dusting off hands]

Tomorrow, onward.

Jeff VanderMeer declares war on Internet and other distractions while he concentrates on finishing the next novel. My personal favourite quote is this:

I [also] quite frankly just love the physical act of writing. Focusing all of my attention on one thing and getting lost in it, frustrated with it, elated with it, arguing with it, hating it, loving it, seeing the true shape of it – that’s bliss.

Word.

And I think I shall go and do likewise. I have Wiscon in just over three weeks, but then I have the summer which is relatively free of other commitments - and I would like to have this new novel at least first-draft-shaped by Fall.

Blogging shall be relatively light; I shall keep up with the standing other-blog commitments (SFNovelists on the 5th of every month and StorytellersUnplugged on the 30th of every month) so you can keep up with musings and thoughts and whatyoucallit on those sites - but I'll be on LJ kind of occasionally, just checking in every so often. It might be worth noting, just in passing, that I've just passed the third anniversary of this journal - that's a commitment all by itself, I won't be going AWAY, just... taking a little leave of absence, as it were.

Because I love the physical act of writing, too. And it's time to wrestle the current recalcitrant chapter into submission and get on with it.

See y'all later.

I just read a comprehensive essay on the subject, which is well worth reading - go here to do likewise - and although I don't agree with EVERYTHING this guy says he makes some wonderful points, and he is also well-read enough to quote from quite a number of other people with names that are quite luminous in the genre who had things to say on the same subject. I'm not going to do that - the quotage, I mean - but the piece did stir up the subject in my own mind and I'm going to throw out a few ideas here.

Fantasy is a lens which sharpens and clarifies the sliver of reality viewed through it, or at least that's what the very best fantasy is. Magic is one of the tools used to accomplish this, and it's a powerful one. I'll even go so far to say that it's a threatening one, because there is, and always has been, that propensity to react against something that affects you deeply.

Sufficiently advanced magic takes on a reality all of its own and begins to be something believed in on its own terms, with something approaching religious faith. This is possibly the reason why the more fundamental Christian ilk feels so violently threatened by such things as the magic in Harry Potter, because they confuse a powerful system of magic being used to shape a fictional story and certain aspects of the reality in which it is based with a potential rival to their own creed and dogma and set of beliefs and a false dichotomy of "people who like and believe THIS cannot possibly believe OUR magic faith and so they must be like be our enemies". And enemies are there to be attacked. And thus magic gets a reputation because it's batting against an already established system which is entrenched, and very much opposed to the things that the new fantasy might be bringing in with it.

superversive writes from the POV of a Catholic baseline – and that may be the reason why I instantly put the thing into a Christian frame in that paragraph above. But I am going to take this one step further, and perhaps into contentious territory. If any sufficiently advanced technology, as the quote goes, is indistinguishable from magic then it is also possible that any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from a religion.

If anything that is beyond our comprehension or ability to explain away by empirical means may be tagged with the word “magic”, then the Christian mythos starts to drip with the thing – what are miracles if not magic? Changing water into wine? Walking on water? Resurrection, for that matter…? But over the course of two thousand years the magic has hardened into a cracked outer shell of dogma. It is no longer the original magic but the recasting of that magic into something useful and controllable by a series of human interpreters who sought to use the instances of true magic into something that supported their own thesis, or theory, or grip on power.

I believe there is real magic in belief. I truly believe that sometimes wishing for something hard enough actually does make it come true because the sheer power of the act of visualisation often means that you are, however unwittingly, also working in real-terms for the manifestation of that thing in your life. I remember reading Richar Bach’s “Illusions: the adventures of a reluctant Messiah” (I couldn’t remember the exact title so I just looked it up and this jumped out at me from one of the book’s Amazon reviews: “I'm a Christian, but believe that when you move beyond a literal interpretation of Christ's words and see the symbolic message in them, it's not too different from what's in this book. But that's a big leap for most Christians and this book will probably make their blood boil).” – this encapsulates precisely the conundrum I was talking about up there in the third paragraph…) Specifically, I am thinking about the blue feather incident, where the reluctant Messiah of the title instructs our POV character, his equally reluctant disciple, on the principles of visualisation. Visualise something, the Messiah says, and it will manifest in your life. All right, says the disiple, a blue feather. The Messiah raises an eyebrow but goes, okay, blue feather. CONCENTRATE on it.

Next thing, they’re passing a dairy delivery truck and our disciple’s eyes go wide. Hey, LOOK, he says, and sure enough, on the side of the truck it says BLUE FEATHER DAIRIES.

This is where it gets interesting.

The disciple says that he expected a “real” blue feather. Yes, says the Messiah, but how did you visualise this when you invited it into your life? Were you holding it in your hand or was it just, like, floating disembodied in space?… Floating, the disciple admits. Well, the Messiah explains, that accounts for it. You didn’t personalise the magic and all you did was manifest a generic iteration of the item that you were seeking, not the thing itself in your possession.

Oooooh. It’s MAGIC. It’s real magic because this is delievered utterly matter-of-factly, as though it were common knowledge, as though anybody could do it.

But this is where the organised and dogmatic faith departs from the pure unfettered faith of a child not yet trained to obey all the “rules”. The original miracles are crusted over by the barnacles of creed, words that are repeated verbatim every Sunday to the point of becoming invisible, and completely detached from the things that they may actually mean. True, there are occasional intra-dogmatic kerfuffles within denominations who argue until they foam at the mouth whether “Body of Christ” and “Blood of Christ” are representations of the things they puport to be or whether they MAGICALLY (and I use the word advisedly) transform into the actual real thing when the priest intones the words above the plate and the chalice. Magic is rich and powerful stuff. Powerful enough to make the faithful, who would otherwise recoil at the idea of eating human flesh or drinking human blood, accept even the most potent of the interpretations of those words when they are uttered by a consecrated being over a consecrated thing and freely partake of it despite the implications and moral and ethical contradictions inherent in what they believe they are consuming.

True magic lies in weaving together something that is impossible with something that is yearning for the impossible in such a way that the impossible thing becomes not just possible but inevitable.

This is what writers do every day.

What is it that makes magic come alive for the reader? Is it that the writer must believe in it first, and to what degree should that belief be taken – philosophical, empirical, dogmatic? What is it about magic that pulls in the human mind? What are the riptides and the undertows of that wine-dark sea in which we all like to occasionally drown?

What makes magic… for YOU?…

I just got a very nice review posted out there in the blogosphere. Stephanie from "Someone's read it already" has given me four out of five stars - ant it's a terrific review.

The star that got taken off? Well, here's what she says in the review:


The writing style on the book was perhaps the only part I did not find excellent. Alexander has quite a turn for poetic language, but sometimes her paragraph-long sentences did not quite match the intended audience for the book. These sentences are not in the dialogue, which was fine; they were in the narration. Again, individual parts of these sentences were lovely, and they were all grammatically correct, but the length was sometimes oppressive. I can’t imagine that fourteen-year-olds would find these more appealing than I do. For example:

Grimoires were temperamental books, sometimes with a life of their own, unpredictable and often dangerous; they were usually kept well apart from the main part of any library, but even so accidents happened every so often and the consequences could be dire.

Again, the story was lovely, and a nice introduction to Thea’s world. I’m very interested to read the next book in the trilogy (which I have on a shelf, quite nearby), and I’m sure I won’t be able to wait for book 3. This book comes recommended to readers who like interesting settings and vibrant characters, but who wouldn’t mind waiting a few months for book 3, and for whom short, choppy sentences aren’t a necessity.

To which my response is, well, yes, but it isn't a bug, it's a *feature*.

Perhaps I am underestimating my readership, at that. Perhaps there are folks out there for whom short and choppy sentences ARE a necessity. But that's just the thing - I've never been able to write them. Short choppy sentences exercise no fascination for me - I get no charge from creating them and therefore I cannot see any reader getting a charge out of reading them, and if I TRIED to write like that I would come off sounding like the very worst of what I've always tried to avoid both reading and writing - someone who is *writing down to her readership*.

When my first ever solo effort got published, a slim little volume of three Oscar Wilde-like fairy tales called "The Dolphin's Daughter and other stories" (you could try AmazonUK, or occasionally you get lucky at Amazon US, but at any rate you can see the cover art if you scroll down to the bottom of this page) what they did was put together these three stories that I had written *for an adult readership*, written in as lush and complex and uncompromising a manner as I knew how, and they had put them together in this little book which was aimed at a 15-year-old demographic. When the proofs of that book came to me to check, I remember holding them out to my father in a hand that literally shook, and saying "You look, I daren't, they must have eviscerated the language." Because I figured they had to have done, in order to make it palatable to a young readership.

You know what? They hadn't. Those proofs remain one of the most lightly edited sets of proofs I've ever seen. Longman trusted the audience; that the trust wasn't entirely misplaced is that - although it currently seems to be on the outs with both Amazons - the book, published in 1995, STILL brings me a trickle of royalties every so often. Still being read. No, it wasn't Potterological, it didn't sell ten million copies, but it sold a respectable number of copies for a thin little book that was never published commercially but only under the auspices of a strictly defined reading project by an educational publisher.

So I throw it out to you. What do you think? Should children's books in general, YA books in particular, be written in short choppy sentences - or is it all right to be lush and complex? sartorias, cynleitichsmith, tltrent... others who are involved with/write/write ABOUT/review YA... what do you think about this issue? How important is language? Should we be making readers stretch beyond what they thought might be the limits of their linguistic capabilities, or should we be writing to the LOWEST common denominator and using language that will make a work of fiction accessible to the less well linguistically endowed? Is it the level of language used or the themes within a story that differentiate a children's book from a YA book?

I was very aware of my audience, of the changed demographic at which the Worldweavers books were aimed, when I wrote these books. And yet... I was writing them for the reader who was once myself, a reader who always wanted more, bigger, brighter, wider, mroe complex, more dramatic. In my own family I was always treated as though I had a mind of my own, and the rule was that if I picked up a book that was in my house and I could understand it and it interested me there were no borders or bans enforced on what my reading material "should" have been. In point of fact I pretty much skipped the whole YA demographic altoghether - which isn't REALLY unexpected, seeing as how recent a marketing bracket that particular genre actually is - and I simply read what were considered to be adult books by the time I was in my early teens. The classics - Austen, Bronte, Stendhal, Hugo - as well as the more "modern" oeuvre which encompassed several Nobel prize winners (Henryk Sienkiewicz, Ivo Andric, Pearl Buck, Sigrid Undsett, John Galsworthy). I thought lush and complex was the way language was SUPPOSED to be.

So. Am I - are writers like me - asking too much of our young readership...? Or can we be said to be nursing these fragile hopes that some day those readers... will grow up as blindly, powerlessly, hopelessly tenderly in love with the lushness of language and word, and believe in it with the same kind of deep and all-encompassing faith...?

So - rdeck and I went trotting down to Seattle yesterday where I shared a reading/signing/Q&A with lmarley (hey, didn't we just say good bye to each other at Seatac on the way back from Idaho...?) and kenyonsf, where we each read from our current new books, all #2 in a series with Kay's a quartet and Louise and me fielding trilogies. We had a good turnout, including friends like bjcooper, jkindall and debtaber (who was also kind enough to be our lift into Seattle, and hey, Deb, we need to talk about the gas money...) There were other friends there too, people from the Vanguard group in Seattle (hi Loren!) and at least one guy who came up to me with copies of the Worldweavers books to sign and told me that he had first tripped over me when I was doing my Jin Shei tour and did my reading in Elliott Bay Books back in July 2005 - and here he was again, telling me how many people he'd turned onto "Jin Shei" since that time, and saying thank you for the new books. Pretty cool, really.

Pertinent questions were asked, after, by the audience; we signed copious quantities of books, both directly for folks and piles of stock which Duane of University Books promised to park on a display the next day; we had munchies, chocolate brownies and rumballs and such, which were a hit; and then we came home and I gave myself permission to officially feel TIRED now.

Woke late this morning. Just to bring me down from the "glamorous author life" strata, discovered that the cats had thrown up downstairs. Twice. Discovered on both occasions by stepping in it. Cleaned that up, forgave the cats both of whom were rubbing themselves around my ankles purring apologetically, and then rolled up my sleeves and played catch-up with the rest of the stuff that had accumulated along the way. Things are getting checked off on a list, all to the good. I am fixing up a couple of chapters of New Novel to send along to Agent Lady in new York, I need to pick up my tax return from my accountant later this week as I have been informed that it is now ready and I need to send THAT off with a whimper, and, well, it's like this - next week the signal ratio might get a tad low. I have a novel to write now, and I have a rare window in which to knuckle down and write it. So that's what's going to be happening in the next six to eight weeks, folks. Writin'. I'll be sittin' here and writin'.

I'm clearing my desk of the last holdouts tomorrow - seeing if there's any other things that need to be mailed or packed or answered or signed or otherwise dealt with, and after that it's going to be word-time.

I'll be around. Wave if you see me. But I warn you, I MIGHT be muttering away to myself as I argue with my characters as to where the story needs to go next and who with, and if I don't happen to see you immediately... it isn't you. Blame the story bubbling at the back of my brain, the one that wants OUT now.

Just been called up to supper. I'll watch some silly TV, after, and probably not stay up too late - still trying to get rid of this pesky cough, and rest is as good as a course of vitamin C at this point. And with a bit of luck I'll have a whole new novel to talk about here. Very soon.

When I was fifteen, they brought a Real Live Author into my school - this was back at the castle in Wales (yes, I went to school in a castle in Wales, it's called Bodelwyddan Castle for those who are interested and no it hasn't been a school for a while now, I just got lucky) and the library was a glorious old dark-wood-panelled room, great arched multi-paned windows with slightly imperfect glass looking out over the gravel path and the great trees outside which were slipping into an early autumnal twilight gloom when the author in question arrived. She stood there in front of us and told it like it is - warts and all - the waiting, the frustration, the blood and sweat and tears, the way an idea struggles mightily in the hands of first the author and then multiple publishing professionals before it sees the light of day - and through it all the light of angels was in her face and it was obvious how much she loved it all anyway, and how lost she would be if she didn't have it.

I think that was one of the seminal moments of my life. Watching a writer talk about a writing life, and thinking, "Yes. That. I want THAT." And then, almost as an afterthought, "Perhaps some day I can make someone ELSE feel this way."

Fast forward almost thirty years.

The library is very different - part of what is almost a brand new out-of-the-box school, a bank of computers on one side, its furnishings modern and economical, its windows looking out on a concrete courtyard. There are kids in the library, on rows of chairs, spilling onto the floor when the chairs ran out, sitting bright-eyed and alert, an author speaking about writing sitting in front of them.

Except this time... the author is me.

I visited a middle school while at Radcon earlier this month, my first real school author visit, and spoke to some 90 6th graders and then after that another 45 or so 7th graders about writing in general and my own books. At one point a polite and precocious 13-year-old sitting on the floor raised his hand, and when I told him to ask his question, he said gravely,

"I don't have a question, I have a comment."

I said, "Okay...?"

"When other authors come here they can't stop talking about their own books," he continued. "You don't do that. I really appreciate it."

Afterwards, when I was done, he got up and came over and stuck out his hand to be shaken and said,

"It was a pleasure to meet you."

I don't know what his parents are doing but they ought to be giving parenting classes.

Today I received a latter of reference from the librarian who arranged the event - and she has included a page of 6th-grader testimonials with it.

One of them thought my accent was "awesome", bless his (or her) cotton socks.

But here's the three that took me back to that fifteen-year-old girl in the gathering twilight listening to her life unfolding before her with a whisper of promise and pain:

“When she talked about the writing process it really helped me.”

“I am not a fantasy type person until [she] came to EMS and told me all the details that make a story marvelous.”

“She really inspired me to start writing my own action/adventure books.”

One day, once upon a time, I dreamed that one day I would live the life of words, and that I might pass on the love of it to others.

And now I have.

I could have used something good to cling to right about now - and the Gods heard me cry out for it. The Gods are kind.

Even as Worldweavers #1 is about to hit the bookstores in paperback...

Even as Worldweavers #2 is about to hit those same bookshelves in its maiden hardcover edition, and the reviews begin to come in...

Even as Worldweavers #3 sits on the editor's desk in New York, hopefully en route to the copyediting process soon...

...I have cleared the decks, finished my research reading, annotated my newest New Book Bible notebook where all my research notes are lovingly stored in tiny crabby handwriting determined to take up every ounce of available space on the page, and I am about to gird my loins and start a brand new project.

Current word count: zero. With luck that should change, fast.

Wish me luck.

- this plagiarism thing. It rears its head every so often, frequently in unexpected places. There are egregious instances, such as the most recent Cassie Edwards scandal or the Lanaia Lee kerfuffle of a little further back - and in these cases it is actually possible to point to sentences, paragraphs, pages, that are acutely and embarrassingly identical to some other sentences, paragraphs, pages, found elsewhere and written by quite other people.

But "plagiarism" is a Red Rag Word - and by that I mean that it can be taken out and waved about in the hope of attracting the bulls to charge, whatever the actual story behind the evidence.

Heaven alone knows why I kept the printout, but I was cleaning out my desk today and I came across an article by Sarah Lyall published in the New York Times on December 7, 2006. That's, like, fairly recent; only the other day it would have been "last year", and it only barely isn't that right now. The title of the article is "Novelists defend one of their own against a plagiarism charge". The gist of the thing is this: novelist Ian McEwan had just been accused of plagiarising from a historical memoir in hos novel "Atonement" (yes, THAT "Atonement". The one that is now a Major Motion Picture in your theaters now).

Authors of the caliber of Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, John Updike, Zadie Smith, Martin Amis and even Thomas Pynchon (who is notorious for shunning publicity) all wrote letters published in that week's Daily Telegraphs, basically standing up and saying "I am Spartacus" - saying that if McEwen was to be so casually accused of this heinous crime then they themselves were intimately acquainted with the crime in question. If anyone was to be waving a tar brush, it seemed, the overwhelming response from the writers was "tar one, tar all". The authors all admitted with gay abandon that they themselves had cheerfully plundered other work - be it historical writing, autobiography, primary-source documents, even other novels - in the writing of their own books, and said that such research was the lifeblood of any novel that depended on period detail. We simply cannot expect our authors to be consciously reincarnated, and to have first-hand knowledge of ancient Rome, the empire of Charlemagne, Columbus's landing in America, the Christmas truce of the First World War, the abdication of an English king for the love of an American divorcee, the Nurenburg trials or the concentration camps of Belsen and Auschwitz, for that matter even the everyday existences of their own grandparents when those good folks were nippers of ten or eleven summers. Denying a writer to research such eras, removed from the author in space and time, would mean that the only novels that ever got written would be soap operas dealing with the trite everyday existences of the authors themselves. If a novel is set in a period in which the author in question was not alive, or was not alive in the social circle or circumstance (s)he is describing, and the author is not allowed to use period material relevant to his or her story to research the background and setting, we are left with either no novel at all or one which is so flimsy and flyaway that a breath would bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.

Lyall quotes Thomas Kennealy, author of "Schindler's list"

"If it is sufficient to point to a simultaneity of events to prove plagiarism then we are all plagiarists, and Shakespeare is in trouble from Petrarch, and Tolstoy stole the material for 'War and Peace'. Fiction depends on a certain value-added quality created on top of the raw material."

Literary editor of the august Times of London, Erica Wagner, weighed in too:

"We have come to a pretty pass where an author like Ian McEwen has to write on the front page of The Guardian explaining what research is. The myth of originality? There's no such thing."

Research is essential, and we all do it, from all sorts of sources. Some of the authors who wrote their letters in support of Ian McEwen revealed their own sources - Colm Toibin admitted to using actual phrases and sentences from the work of Henry James in "The Master", his (fictional) reimagining of a period in the life of said Henry James; Rose Tremain acknowledged that her book "Music and Silence" depended, as she put it, "to a shocking extent" on a small illustrated book by the name of "Christian IV" by one Birger Mikkelson; Peter Carey, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, said, "There's a line from 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' in 'Bliss'. 'Oscar and Lucinda' has a Christmas pudding lifted from Edmund Gosse's 'Father and Son', and a number of consecutive zoological words practically snipped from the zoological notes of P.H. Gosse. There are also sentences from the Bible and a tourist brochure, too."

Carey summed it up, I think, when he said that the work of the novelist was essentially "...mixing what we see with what we think, with that which can never be." Or with that which once was, but is now beyond our physical grasp - except when reached through the medium of a memoir of the time, or a work of history, or... heck, even zoological notes.

Perhaps even black-footed ferrets. If only they had not been forced into Cassie Edwards's story with a sledgehammer.

Academia puts it thusly, that lifting information from just one source is plagiarising; lifting from many sources is research. Let's just keep this in perspective when we look at the word "plagiarism" being flung about with what seems to be such glee sometimes. Yes, there are cases where you can point at it and an instance of it will sit up an beg like a prairie dog, just ASKING for a game of whack-a-mole. But if an author has read twenty books about the period in which their story is set, and inadvertently strings together four words in the same order in which they appeared in some dusty tome published in the early part of the twentieth century and long relegated to the oubliette of public indifference - give them the benefit of the doubt. No writer worth his or her salt WANTS to go out there and become famous for someone else's words. We all have to do some research, or else the readers would (rightly) pillory us for not doing it. So long as we don't actually stray from the straight and narrow, and freely acknowledge and praise our sources where acknowledgment and praise are due - so long as you KNOW that we are doing our homework and not buying the paper off some sleazy Internet essay mill - let us cross our bridges in peace. And do our research.

And dream new dreams inspired by all the times and places that are the heritage of human history.

For anyone who hasn't been snoozing over the last week or so, there's a new plagiarism scandal loose on the Internet. Read all about it (or remind yourself) by going to the place where it begins, here.

Romance novelist Cassie Edwards - who, after what appears to have been a steady stream of books and a nice little career in the romance field, should really know better - appears to be unable to tell the difference between research and out-and-out copycatting. In the book "Shadow Bear", a romance between a pioneer (white) woman and a Lakota chief who goes by the sobriquet of Shadow Bear - and whose toned, virile physique supposedly adorns the book's cover - Edwards commits the ultimate stupidity. She not only completely cut-and-paste plagiarises something to the point that it really is a word for word repeat - she takes what was essentially a scholarly study on the black-footed ferret and tries to stuff the whole thing whether it will or no into dialogue. What's more, she uses a study whose author is still alive and kicking, and who, indeed, kicks back right here

He gives you a taste of what is going on. Let me quote a little bit - this is too good to pass up - to set the scene our cast iron cliche Indian chief (if we are to judge by the book cover) and his pioneer hottie have just indulged in a bout of hot'n'stemy sex, and in the afterglow our fearful white heroine hears an unfamiliar rustle, and Is Afraid. What could it be? Hostile Indians? Wild beasts?...

Well, yeah, sorta. Beasts. Let Paul Tolme tell you the rest:

It's just a family of ferrets. Phew. Let's put aside for now that ferrets live on the prairie, where there are no bushes—never mind the forest where Edwards has set her characters. Seeing the cute animals, Shiona and Shadow Bear launch into a discussion about the cute little critters.

"They are so named because of their dark legs," Shadow Bear says, to which Shiona responds: "They are so small, surely weighing only about two pounds and measuring two feet from tip to tail."

Shiona then tells Shadow Bear how she once read about ferrets in a book she took from the study of her father. "I discovered they are related to minks and otters. It is said their closest relations are European ferrets and Siberian polecats," she says. "Researchers theorize that polecats crossed the land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska, to establish the New World population."

Shadow Bear responds: "What I have observed of them, myself, is that these tiny animals breed in early spring when the males roam the night in search of females." As the ferrets bound off into some distant bushes, he continues: "Mothers typically give birth to three kits in early summer and raise their young alone in abandoned prairie dog burrows."

Shiona: "I read that ferrets stalk and kill prairie dogs during the night. Using their keen sense of smell and whiskers to guide them through pitch-black burrows, ferrets suffocate the sleeping prey, an impressive feat considering the two species are about the same weight." Shiona shivers, upset by the thought of the cute animals locked in mortal combat.

Sensing her vulnerability, Shadow Bear knows just what to say: "In turn, coyotes, badgers, and owls prey on ferrets, whose life span in the wild is often less than two winters … They have a short, quick life."

"Researchers theorize"???

"The land bridge that once linked Siberia and Alaska"?

"The New World Poplulation"?

"Siberian polecats"?

"Related to minks and otters"?

***IN DIALOGUE BETWEEN A "NOBLE SAVAGE" AND A WOMAN WHOSE EDUCATION PROBABLY ENDED IN A ONE-ROOM SCHOOLHOUSE AND I DON'T CARE WHAT HER FATHER"S OCCUPATION WAS?***

Plagiarism, okay - but STUPID plagiarism. Something that doesn't, cannot, possibly fit into her story. And doesn't need to. It isn't even that she plagiarised something and then hung the story on that peg, made it something that the story couldn't stand without, anything, ANYTHING, *ANYTHING* but a discussion of the provenance and mating habits of black-footed ferrets in high-level academic language between a man whose English, if he knows any, would probably be a rather rudimentary kind and a woman who knows no Lakota and who would have disdained to use it if she did. Besides, given the circumstances - "virtuous" white woman taken (presumably with a fair degree of roughness) by a man whose standing in her own world and community is no higher than "there ain't no good Indian 'cept a dead Indian" - well, I might expect stoic silence or tears - or even, given that this IS a bodice ripper romantic novel, a passionate surrender along the lines of "let's do it again, warrior man". A conversation about black-footed ferrets? No. No, no, no. Not even in a book that ISN'T a genre romance geared to hot steamy sexual encounters.

Let me say this. I myself write books for which I do research. I read MANY books to write ONE. How do I do this? I read the research material, I take notes which give me the information I need in my own words, and when all is said and done I put away the original material and work from my notes, weaving them into the background of my story. I do not consider such research, and such usage, to be plagiarism, and I don't think that anyone would SERIOUSLY suggest that every piece of information gleaned from such research needs to be footnoted in the manner of a non-fiction book on the subject where, if you state something that you've discovered while writing your material, you footnote it in the back as "[source], [author], [where and when published], [page numbers where found]" It is good manners to acknowledge your sources somewhere, sure, and that's what the acknowledgment page in novels is for - "I would like to thank X, author of Y, without whose invaluable book my own would have been diminished". But footnoting everything in a book of fiction? No, and I don't think anyone seriously holds that out as a suggestion. Fiction is fiction, after all, and it's part of its job description to be a lie - you don't footnote truth in a lie, you just acknowledge where the truth came from and that it played a role in inspiring your particular lie.

But what Cassie Edwards has done goes way beyond research. Even if she shouldn't have known better than to introduce into the hapless heads of her characters information and attitudes they could not possibly have had (Shadow Bear the Lakota warrior comes off rather comically as an amateur naturalist, spending hours crouching over black-footed ferret dens and meticulously documenting their behaviour on a piece of birch bark to file with the rest of his birch bark library on the intimate behaviour of raccoons, coyotes, and - why not - Siberian polecats...) she is shoveling coal as fast as she can into an engine leading her story to an inglorious train wreck. If she knew nothing else, her multitudes of novels should have taught her how to tell a good story - and some little part of her brain should have been screaming alarms at the introduction of the ferrets at all, let alone in this paricular post-coital afterglow context.

And if she couldn't bear to excise the ferrets... good GOD, where was her editor in all this? Where was a guiding hand, a calm voice which would inform the author that a caricature is not the same as a character and that her own pair of protagonists were suddenly spouting off in what was NOT their natural voice, and knowing things they could have no possible idea about in the time and place where they had been placed? I don't know where the buck stops, not really, but the one place it should NOT have landed was with the readers. A writer's contract with their readers is simply to write a story that is good, that is readable (compulsively readable if you're good and lucky), and that has a consistency or at least an internal self-consistency of the kind that would let it stand by itself if not supported - unlike "Shadow Bear" and supposedly (according to the Internet) a number of Cassie Edwards' other books. Yes, the writer in question is supposed to be 71 years old, and it has been suggested that we should all leave the old lady alone - but all I can think of in the current context that plagiaristic hope springs eternal because there have been scandals with authors ranging from 19 (remember Kaavya Visivathan and her half-a-million deal which was scrapped because of plagiarism) to, now, 71 - hope springs eternal, it seems, in the breast of storytellers too lazy or too unwilling or too damned ignorant to tell their own stories and too quick to cross their fingers and pretend that nobody else will ever know.

Ideas are cheap, and they often come in waves, and it seems as though a dozen authors are coming up with the same damn trope at the same time. I know of at least one author whom I consider a personal friend who was - unbeknownst to me - working on a story which involved a seventh child of a seventh child, much like my Thea is in the Worldweavers series. She was writing hers and I was writing mine, half a continent away - she is in Minnesota and I am on the Pacific Coast and it isn't as though we yak on the phone daily, we had no idea what the other was doing... until my books came out and she grumbled "damn, she got there first". The ideas are free. But our STORIES are quite different. What she did with the idea and what I did with the idea are two quite different things, to the point that a reader who picked up both might only subliminally picked up that the basic bedrock upon which these two edifices were built was in fact the same foundation. You cannot plagiarise an idea, because the human brain is an idea generator, and you cannot prove that somebody else's synapses didn't fire synchronously and come up with the same thought that your own synapses latched onto. But if you go out and take the story - or the scientific study - written by that other person, and then lift entire sentences, entire paragraphs, and simply paste them into your own work - that's crossing a line.

And hey - newsflash - you WILL be found out. In today's electronic age, where things fly around the world in the blink of an eye, EVERYONE will know. Fast. One career, down the drain. It doesn't matter what else you've done or accomplished, get caught cheating in this way and nobody will ever quite trust you again - even if you go on to write absolutely scintillating and deathless *and original* prose, because everyone will be looking over your shoulder to see where you might have lifted THAT from.

There are many lists of attributes that have been floating around as being necessary for, or defining, a writer. Perseverance. Faith in yourself and your work. Industriousness. Professionalism.

I would like to add one more, without which none of the others are worth much.

Integrity.

In the end, there is nothing left except this: "These words are my own". You stand and fall on that. Nobody else's laurels will hold you up.

OF COURSE we bought books at Powells while we were in Portland. You really thought we went into that place and walked out empty-handed...?

I got some great research books for both the current project in the throes of research, and for a potential future project which might be of interest. One of the latter books was a gorgeous older volume, in quite good shape but obviously an aged book - it looked good, it was on a subject that interested me, and I bought it.

When I came home with it, rdeck, who hadn't really had the opportunity of inspecting my hoard before I packed it away for the homeward journey in the Portland hotel room, turned this thing over in his hands with interest and asked, "When was this published?"

Which was the first time I looked.

And discovered I was holding a book published in 1857.

The oldest book I own is a law book, in Latin, dating back to the early 1700's - probably worth less than it sounds it might be but a treasure for me simply because -well - wow - it was bouncing around this tired old world three centuries ago. The French Revolution hadn't happened yet. The Sun still revolved around the Earth, and scientists were known as "natural philosophers" - Isaac Newton was still almost newly dead. People were still dealing with the fallout from the Great Plague of London. The world was waking up to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Immanuel Kant. And this book was knocking around the same world, and being read, and being understood (Latin was still a language of learning and knowledge and the gowned academics pored over dusty Latin tomes with hand-drawn illustrations). It gives me a frisson just to hold that book and know that it is a bridge between myself and some reverent hand which has been dust for three hundred years.

I love old books.

This is why I have never warmed to electronic "readers". Three hundred years from now, the Amazon Kindles and their ilk will be so much electronic junk. The books, they endure.

Under the auspices of the current LiveJournal Bittercon (i.e. a convention-like gathering of sorts for those of us not at World Fantasy Con, Kate Elliott poses the question Why Do You Write as her own contribution - and specifically, she asks,

I’d like to hear more probing thoughts about the relationship between writing and publication. Does publication validate the act of writing in a way that writing without publication does not? Or in some ways but not in others? In your experience do some people only value published writing, and not the multitude of other forms writing can take?

Lots of good discussion ensued, including a few volleys by Yours Truly - but it got me thinking along certain lines, and questioning the evolution of the Ages of Writing.

Ignoring for the nonce the question of just exactly WHEN one begins to write and call it "writing" in the sense that one is consciously starting to produce something that's possibly, perhaps, intended as a conscious effort at story or poem and intended for actual readers who might be other than the writer him or herself and their invisible childhood companions - I think we all begin with an Age of Innocence. This is that period of time when you're just discovering something fascinating and new, falling in love, if you like, writing for the rush of joy and of adrenaline when something - a phrase, a paragraph, a poem, a story - actually comes together in something resembling perfection at least in your eyes - or, if nothing else, something that's coherent and consistent and that you wouldn't be inclined to shove under your bed if anyone ever walked in on you doing it unawares. Something that you have the first basic inkling that you might, one day, become very proud of.

This comes in a series of levels, of course, and you get the gamut - at the two extremes, people who basically DO write for themselves and themselves alone, or perhaps a few very close friends or family members and are perfectly happy with that status quo and would not care if it ever changed at all, and people who begin to feel an itch of wanting something else, something MORE, something *OTHER*, who begin to realise that all those books they so love reading have actually been produced by people not so very much unlike themselves, and start to wonder just how one gets to be one of those people. In other words, the first tiny tingling idea of the possibility of publication.

There's a threshold. You inch up to it, sometimes you back up to it, often you hover at it for a long, long, long time - but if you're the kind of writer who keeps on writing and who wants to be read, you slowly realise that you are in the nursery, that there are pretty pictures on your walls, that everything in the room that you're in is safe and padded and pink and gentle and geared not to hurt you - but that across that threshold, outside that door, there is a world that is at once far more dangerous and deadly - where the games are real and you REALLY die if you die and you don't get to sleep it off and wake up the next morning ready to try again - where the hurts hurts more... and yet where the joys are more incandescent for the simple reason that they ARE real and unfiltered and raw, where the things that are wonderful are the real things and not the toys, where you sink your hands to the elbows in the stuff of LIFE and begin to feel the texture of it, nubby and gritty and fragile like butterfly wings and sharp like broken coral and soft like moss on the south-facing side of trees - and there are mirrors which don't belong back in the fairy tales, but which reflect back nothing except unadulterated truth.

And you stumble across that threshold by accident at last, or something in that pretty nursery finally pushes you, or else you have stared out of that door for so long that your feet take matters into their own, er, hands, and simply take you across the thing without your quite knowing how you got there...except that you are aware at some deep fundamental level that you CHOSE to do it...

And now - well - it's my day to blog over at the SFNovelists site, so if you want to know what happens next, go scurry over there...