"No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

1. Yes, I know. No, nothing in particular, other than inertia and a lot of "Oh, my, is that the time?" I had the best of intentions, but you know how that one goes.

2. Well, that, and I was persuaded at some length to join Facebook. Where I think I owe a bunch of people karma, or daffodils, or appletinis, or something. Damn place is crack cut with pure evil.

3. And because I'm so good at keeping up with all my other commitments, I'm also posting to a brand-new blog featuring the members of the writing group to which Elly so graciously invited me back in the spring, and which has been occupying occasional Tuesdays for me ever since. The good news is that this is one o' them group-type thingies, so my occasional dropping out of existence might not be felt quite so keenly there.

4. Yes, I am indeed doing NaNoWriMo this year. I seriously considered extending my hiatus another round, but this is NaNoWriMo X and I'm a sucker for a lost cause. And I might not even play to win this year. (Donations of coffee and pie can be sent round to the usual address, nevertheless.)

5. Uh, so, what have you guys been up to? Did I miss anything?

Animals Belonging to the Emperor

So the last time around I mentioned my quirky and highly subjective system of organization for my bookshelves (and, indeed, other shelvable media as well). As it happens, last week Elly threw down the gauntlet for bookshelf pr0n posts, so this seems like as good an excuse as any to take a tour of one small corner of my library. So, then: Mah buks. Let me show u them:

This is the bookshelf most focused on straight-up prose fiction in my office (as opposed to reference books, graphic novels, or art books), so it seems like a natural one to showcase for you library voyeurs. Moving in closer:

The Datlow and Windling Year's Best anthologies were what restored my faith in modern fantasy back in the early 90's. My shelf fits exactly volumes one through eighteen; I don't know if that's a sign to stop, or to get different shelves. Also featured here are Thomas Monteleone's Borderlands anthologies, which are delightfully weird and dark, and a couple of Chaosium Mythos collections. (Frodo sculpture by Big Tony; and yes, the sign on top is from a Borders, though I confess I came by it through entirely legitimate means.)

Here we have New Weird, Old Weird, slipstream, and horror. The first third is classic weird fiction in more or less chronological order: Lautreamont, Chambers, Machen, Dunsany, M.R. James, Blackwood, and Lovecraft. In the middle are my personal favorite Lovecraft heirs, William Browning Spencer and Thomas Ligotti (and I don't use phrases like "the gem of my collection," but if I did, I'd say it about the hardback copy of Ligotti's Teatro Grottesco there at center stage), followed by the often Ligottian Darrell Schweitzer, Brian McNaughton, Jeff VanderMeer, Jeffrey Thomas, and Mark Danielewski. From there we have different sorts of all-out deconstructive weird fantasy: K.J. Bishop, Jay Lake, China Mieville, and Scott Lynch. Floating above are the unclassifiable Robert Aickman, more Mythos anthologies, the multi-talented Ramsey Campbell, and Hal Duncan's Vellum, which has kicked my ass every time I try to pick it up. (The Thing in a Jar there behind my tavern pipe was a 33rd birthday present from Spyder, and you're probably happier not seeing it any closer.)


And here is a whole bunch of urban fantasy and the genres adjacent thereto, all sort of circling around the Big Block o' Neil Gaiman in the middle, with some high fantasy and space opera thrown in for good measure. Hiding behind the hip UF and tie-in novels on the right, Fritz Leiber's Lankhmar books are keeping thematic company with Ellen Kushner's Riverside mannerpunk. From there I've got Patricia McKillip's Riddle-Master (probably my favorite Tolkienian fantasy that isn't actually very much like LOTR) and Gaiman's novels and collections, followed closely by Alan Moore and Mike Carey, likewise comics writers-turned-novelists. The rest of the shelf is filled out (to bring things full circle) with the sort of fiction the Year's Best anthologies made me fall in love with: Susanna Clarke, Kelly Link, Elizabeth Bear, Ekaterina Sedia, Cat Valente, and some wonderfully pulpy dark urban fantasy by Jim Macdonald and Stephan Zielinski. Outliers include more eBear, Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, Guy Gavriel Kay, Cory Doctorow, the first Liz Williams Detective Inspector Chen book (which I'm now reading, and is delightful), and, of course, John Crowley's Little, Big. Just below you can see a tantalizing hint of the next shelf down, which is All Clive Barker, All the Time (and which I'm going to have to find something creative to do with when he gets around to the next Abarat book).

(There's actually more to this bookcase as well, but it's sort of behind my laundry basket, and no one wants to see that.)

And just to show what a ridiculously obsessive completist I am, I've gone and made sure that everything in the above photos (along with a great deal more shelved elsewhere) is in my catalog at LibraryThing, which is a relatively new addiction for me and so I haven't actually added everything I own. Give me time.

Merry Measure: Epilogue

It's officially the close of the season; happy Twelfth Night, everyone. For your imminent Epiphany, this Magian gift: the enormously talented Cat Valente, who seems to be assuming the mantle of the new century's Angela Carter, has a Winter Queen speech at Green Man Review for an issue dedicated to her work. It is lovely and moving and full of her strange magic, so go thou and read.

Sir Toby. ...Does not our life consist of the four elements?
Sir Andrew. Faith, so they say; but I think it rather consists of eating and drinking.
Sir Toby. Th'art a scholar! Let us therefore eat and drink.

- Twelfth Night II:iii

And blessed be, all every one.

Return of the Fandom Stranger

Q: O great and wise Oracle, I see that there's an interesting new organization that's advocating for the legitimacy of fan-produced derivative art and seems to have some intriguing ideas. Do you think maybe there could be a discussion of it on the Internets that doesn't almost instantly spiral off into some lackwit wondering why anyone would want to write someone else's characters, and how ethically bankrupt it would be to do so, ever?

A: Don't be silly. Of course not.

The Breaking of the World

Another in a year of lost lights: Jim Rigney, who wrote under the name Robert Jordan, died on Sunday.

He was, by all accounts, a fine human being as well as an accomplished writer: kind, funny, generous, and even in his declining health larger-than-life. The late John M. Ford thought the world of him and his work, and drew the map at the front of the Wheel of Time books; now they are both gone into the Mystery, alas, and the world is poorer.

He was also one of those names who polarized fandom, with his work often seeming to generate praise and vitriol in equal measure, and the reflexive slagging of his books got to be unfortunately popular in a lot of circles. And certainly it's possible to go on at length about his flaws and excesses (I myself drifted away from the series a few volumes back, when the event-to-page-count ratio seemed to be steadily decreasing), but I think, as Elizabeth Bear once said of another popular author, that it doesn't matter what he did wrong in light of how many things he did right. If nothing else, the criticism of his work as generic and derivative was undeserved; he did an awful lot to drag epic fantasy out of the Tolkienian mold, engineering a world that was neither medieval nor strictly western European in its inspiration, rich and evocative and wonderfully strange. (And on top of all that, he also wrote Conan just about as well as anyone since Howard himself.)

He inspired me to write one pretty good song, which I think was the first I put a barre chord in on purpose, and made an enormous impression on the way I think about epic fantasy and its possibilities. Despite not having kept up with the books themselves, I've continued to admire their imagination and ambition (and I've never stopped wanting a heron mark sword, either). I'm very sad to learn that he didn't get to see his grand tale through to the end (though there are rumors that he disclosed the secrets of the final volume to his wife and a few close friends, so it's just possible the rest of us will, after all), but I hope he knew how deeply his creation touched the people who loved it, and how much joy it gave his readers to have his world take up space in our heads.

Some remembrances of note (among many others) here, here, here, and here.

Pick a Window!

In the spirit of honoring the anniversary of the Second Defenestration of Prague, I've finally tossed a bunch of outdated links and got the new comments up and running. Will see about importing the old comments into the new format soon, but meanwhile, we'll actually be able to have conversations around here again. Huzzah.

Have also plunged into the forum-moderation business lately, as I recently helped to found the Charm City Science Fiction & Fantasy board over on Google Groups. It's a sort of offshoot of the writing workshop I joined a couple of months ago, but I don't see much point in restricting membership to either writers or locals, so those of you whose reading habits skew at all like mine (um, is there anyone in the readership here who isn't some variety of skiffy nerd?) should go o'er and join in.

I owe some of you emails. I am aware of this, and have not forgotten you. All will be well.

Dialogue, Duologue, Diatribe

Memes again! This one's what might be described as "self-tagging." If any of my faithful readership want to carry on with it, here's how it works:

Leave me a comment saying, "Interview me."
I respond by asking you five personal questions so I can get to know you better. If I already know you well, expect the questions may be a little more intimate!
You WILL update your journal/bloggy thing/whatever with the answers to the questions.
You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the post.
When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Me, I've volunteered to be interviewed by the sharp and eloquent Belledame, who it was my pleasure to actually hang out with in person during Spyder's birthday celebration a few weekends back. (Yes, she is also wicked cool in the flesh.) Anyway, here follow the results:

1) Who's your favorite Gaiman character?

Starting right in with the easy ones, I see.

There's a lot to choose from here, but I have to say the one I was always happiest to see come around in the pages of Sandman was Hob Gadling. Hob is, for my money, a really fine example of Gaiman magic - he's frequently arrogant, self-absorbed, opportunistic, and full of his own sense of entitlement, and at the same time he's genuinely charming and witty and even (eventually) compassionate, and very human in spite of all the weird things he sees over the centuries. (I love how, even after hundreds of years and all his changes of fortune, his self-image is still of a scruffy 14th-century freeman commoner.) He's almost always a grounding force in the Sandman storylines, and that's not an obvious trick to pull off with a character who's immortal. Plus he gets a lot of the best lines, especially at the Ren Faire in "Sunday Mourning" ("You should spray 'em with shit as they come through the gates").

And I have to say that his storyline was ballsy in a lot of ways. He gets wiser and sadder, yes; but he doesn't learn any kind of stupid lesson that the value of life is that it ends. He learns that, despite everything, given a chance, the more of life he gets the more he wants more of it. There's something very honest and true about that, and using fantasy to say honest and true things is pretty much what I read Neil Gaiman for.

2) If you could play any musical instrument that you can't already play, what would it be?

I'd love to play lute and/or harp, the two emblematic instruments of the musical heritage I identify most strongly with. Actually, what I'd really like is to have the patience and dexterity necessary to learn those techniques, because I'm really crap at arpeggios and fingerpicking, to the extent that I sometimes wonder if there isn't some kind of actual learning disability at work.

On the more reasonable end of my capabilities, I'd really like to learn the hurdy-gurdy.

3) Favorite epoch for clothing?

Again with the easy questions. Damn.

Well, forced to narrow it down to a reasonable timeframe, considering that I'm fond of pretty much everything from cowls and liripipes on one end of the timeline to cavalier coats on the other, I'd have to say the 16th century. (Raise your hand, everyone who's surprised. Yeah, that's what I thought.) Say what you will about ruffs and pumpkin pants - and as far as over-the-top frippery goes, I'll take those in a heartbeat over a lot of other sartorial excesses - there's just something about a well-fashioned doublet that's pure style and cool. Plus, rapiers. And codpieces.

4) Name an actor or public figure you think is the hawtness.

I'm hardly unique in this, I'm sure, even in the switch-hitting dork set, so it will shock exactly no one to learn that Aly Hannigan and Alan Cumming have occupied honored places on my Freebie List for some small time now. I mean, hello.

5) What makes you happy?

The seasons changing. Moonlight. Starlight. Having a house full of people I love. New books. Traveling. Coming home. City lights. Trees. My puppy and my kitten. Staying up late. Getting up early. Sleeping in. Good food and drink. Smart pop culture, and having conversations about it. Music. Finding other people who are in my tribe. Knowing someone loves something I've created. Going to the movies. Having quiet time to read. Being friends for ten years and counting with the person I'm married to. Making things up.

NaNoSeconds, Part IV

Whee! I am woefully behind! This will, I hope, be corrected for as of the the upcoming three-day weekend; in the meantime, another set of helpful hints for myself and all the rest of you.

Everything I Need to Know About Plot I Learned from Running RPGs

1. No outline survives contact with the characters.

2. You don't have to have every room mapped out if you keep a couple of generic encounters handy.

3. However, if something is on the map, you had better be prepared for when someone inevitably decides they need to go there.

4. Don't make the supporting cast more interesting than the heroes; they'll keep drawing your attention at the protagonists' expense. This is fair to no one.

5. The search for fortune alone is probably the least interesting thing for the heroes to be motivated by.

6. If you don't give them something to fight, solve, or negotiate with at all times, the characters will get bored and wander off on their own.

7. If you come to a place where nothing much is happening, you should sum it up briefly and move along to the next good part.

8. Someone will want more firepower unless you come up with a very good reason not to give it to them.

9. At least some of the characters will discover that it's to their advantage to act like thugs at least some of the time. This is more interesting if you allow there to be consequences for it.

10. Archetypes are best used as a starting point for creating individuals.

11. Someone will inevitably want to try something not covered by the rules. It's more fun if you don't always say "no."

12. When things threaten to get out of control, remember that you are in charge.

13. The people you are trying to entertain have read the rulebooks, and probably the adventure scenario too. You don't have to throw something unexpected at them, but if you don't, don't be upset if no one seems surprised.

NaNoSeconds, Part II

This one I posted to the Plot Doctoring section of the NaNoForums. It's long, and substantial, and probably mostly speaks for itself. I should make the point here, once again, that I am in no position at all to be dispensing writing advice, callow amateur that I am, but I'm not really letting that get in my way. And it's proven to be a popular thread on the boards, which certainly warms my dark little Gothic dilettante heart.

I suppose I should also confess that, in addition to having lifted many of the ideas from my playwrighting and directing classes back in my miscreant Theatre Major days, I recycled some of this from one of my Last Dark Art columns on RPG.net a coupla years back. I figure if you can't cannibalize yourself, there's no point even getting into the biz at all.

Dramatic Plotting Made Simple

...if not, perhaps, "easy" as such.

Okay.

What follows is a very particular slant on the idea of plot-engineering, designed to (hopefully) jog the writing of those who do character well but couldn't outline with a Maguffin to their head, or who intend to spend their precious October prep time creating a really amazing setting without being bothered to decide ahead of time what happens there. It's founded on the principles of playwrighting as I learned them as a wee dramaturg at the knees of several learned gurus of the Theatre some witch's dozen years ago, though the application is very broad and flexible; thus, Dramatic Plotting, in several senses of the word.

To understand plot, it is necessary to understand the smallest unit of plot: the event.

An event happens when pressure is applied to the characters in sufficient quantity to force one or more of them to take action to relieve it. If this is done right, the resolution creates a new pressure which must be dealt with in turn, and so on until the force of the narrative winds itself down in a satisfactory way.

Constructing an event can be tricky, especially if you have any inclination to resist being cruel to your cast. A general guideline is that the bigger the initial pressure, the more momentum the events that follow from it will have. Pressure is the fuel that drives the engine of plot; don't underfuel your story vehicle. Turn the pressure on early, and crank it high.

(So what makes a good source of pressure? It depends on the people it's happening to. The key is that it doesn't have to be earth-shaking - it just has to shake up the world of the characters. People are very capable of blowing up trivial matters to life-and-death proportions, as long as something they care enough about is in the balance. Know the needs and desires of your characters; find out something they want badly, and take it away from them.)

The other thing that makes event-construction challenging is that it's very tempting to create a good, solid event that resolves too easily and ends the story. Once again, avoiding this requires being mean to your characters. This is where you need to stack the deck: create dilemmas where the only choices are two bad ones. Force them between desires that are mutually exclusive. Set up conflicts that aren't good vs. evil, but good vs. good (or bad vs. bad, even). Make them give up something else they treasure in order to something they want just a little bit more, and then give them a reason to regret it. Do whatever you have to do to keep the pressure not only on, but escalating, so that each new solution has inherent in it a new problem (or two, or three). And remember that, very broadly speaking, happy and contented people make for lousy stories. Give them a reason to be miserable, and watch events unfold.

The advantage of this method of constructing (and thinking about) plot is that, done right, it develops organically, out of the characters' own conflicting motivations; events that are created out of pressure don't feel artificial or contrived, as if the author is simply moving the cast around like pieces on a board. The disadvantage, of course, is that it has the tendency to take on a great deal of runaway momentum, and may not end up having much to do with where the author intended it all to go. This is Okay, of course (and after you do it for a while, you learn to nudge the pressures to put people where you want them to go), but may not be satisfactory to those who like a great deal of structure.

Not the only way to run a novel, obviously, and certainly not the only useful one; but an approach with a great deal of potential for breaking the writer out of the trap of having a lot of cool ideas and nowhere to go with them, and keeping the wheels of what-happens-next turning until you find a way to wind them down.

***

(Several posters come in with good questions.)

An example of an event? Okay - a well-known one, even. (I'm assuming y'all speak Fannish, or at least have been to the movies in the last few years.)

Frodo finds out his crazy uncle's magic trinket is actually the legendary One Ring - and not only is Sauron trying to get it back, he probably knows where it is and is sending the Black Riders to collect it as we speak. When, and not if, they get to the Shire, they'll tear the place apart until they get what they came for. Pressure abounds! Frodo takes the Ring and hits the road. That's an event.

Of course, that means now he's on the road, in territory he's never been, hunted, and by the way trying to keep his friends and his gardener from getting themselves inadvertently killed for his sake. Lots of new pressure, and that's not even including the fact that Gandalf doesn't show at the planned rendezvous, and now there's some shady guy in a cloak eyeballing him, and the enemy's closing in... and so on and so on all the way to Mount Doom.

Or how about this one, from more literal drama: Lear is King of Britain, but he's getting old and tired. He decides he's going to divide up his kindom among his three daughters and retire to a life of leisure. (This is arguably the first event, and note how it's a small pressure and a relatively minor event - and note too that the action is already in motion when the curtain comes up, and how we're coming in just as things begin to get interesting. This is an Important Lesson.) But just as the ceremony's going well, Lear springs on everyone his wacky idea of asking his daughters how much they love him - in front of the court and all the nobles - and rewarding them in proportion to how much they stroke his regal ego. Pressure in spades! And it turns out that his youngest is caught between her duty and her integrity (or possibly stubbornness) and just will not play along with Dad in his quest for empty flattery; she's caught between two bad choices and makes the only one she can. That's an event. So Lear goes apeshit, declares her banished and by the way disinherited, and generally makes a big ugly scene in front of the gods and everyone. New pressure! So now Lear's right-hand man Kent decides he can't keep his mouth shut or leave well enough alone either, and calls the king out... and so on. You get the idea.

As to how many events are necessary for a decent novel - well, "as many as it takes" is the wiseass answer, but also maybe the best one. You need to start building to an event every time it looks like nothing is in danger of happening. This is the idea behind the "When in doubt, send in two men with guns" advice or its several variants. It means that when things are floundering, it's probably because the pressure's letting up before it needs to. Turn up the pressure! Spin the dials until something breaks!

A better answer, maybe, is: Look through the books you love - the ones that were real page-turners. Find the events - the places where Something Happened that made you say "Oh my god! What's next?" Events, and the new pressures that result from them, are the hook that keeps the reader in the tale. You need as many as necessary to keep the story in motion and the reader hooked.

***

(Later.)

It occurs to me that I might not have answered the questions of yesterday's responders as fully and well as I should ought to have done; and that Examples from Lit'rature, however well-diagrammed, might not offer much help in how to build your own. So.

How do you create an initial event? Well, you (presumably) have your characters, and you have your setting, and you have an understanding of how the one interacts with the other. Somebody here wants something (and if they don't, you better get in there and make damn sure they do). Whatever initial pressure you introduce has to engage the characters in what they desire.

Desires come in a lot of flavors, but you can do well by the basics: Love. Comfort. Home. Dignity. Honor. Those come up all the time because they're things lots of people can relate to wanting, and wanting badly. (And by the way, lots of other needs boil down, in the end, to one of these.) But the trick is, too, that you need to be specific. What are the boundaries of this person's honor? What are the requirements of home? What sort of love does this person need to find to be truly happy? Once you establish this, you should also pinpoint whether this want is something they're looking for, or something they have that you can take away. This is going to determine the nature of the pressure you exert, and how you're going to really get them where it hurts.

So if you're going with love (and there's no reason why you shouldn't), and you're further exploring your protagonist's need for romantic love, and you know exactly the kind of Honorific Right they're seeking, you've got a nice little hook you can slip into them to begin to apply your pressure. Now you can start throwing obstacles between them and the thing they're after. Boy Meets Girl And They Fall In Love And Are Happy does not make good story. Boy Meets Girl and one of them loves another; or their love is forbidden; or one of them has Other Obligations; or one of them dies - all do. This is why love triangles, Romeo-and-Juliet scenarios, and tragic marriages of one kind or another are such popular and durable ideas. They're cliches because they continue to work.

Now - whatever obstacles are messing up your characters' lives (creating pressure), they have to be present and immediate, or nothing is going to happen: no event. And part of the trick of making it work right is that the characters' desires have to measure up to the pressure at hand. Boy meets girl (or whatever recombination or variant tickles your squid, natch), and one of them loves another, and the other shrugs and moves on: Also not a story. For a proper, solid event, people need to be, in some measure, desperate.

This is where you need to make sure the pressure is at a high enough level. "The love of my life doesn't love me, but I can wait" is probably not sufficient to create an event on its own. "The love of my life is marrying Bruno Brutenheim unless I do something about it TONIGHT" - probably is.

The exact nature of the event depends very much on the nature of the people involved. In the scenario above, what our hapless romantic hero will do to resolve the pressure depends on what kind of guy he is. Does he try and serenade his beloved with her favorite lovesong? Propose to her himself? Seduce her after the rehearsal dinner? Kidnap her? Kill Bruno? The important thing is that he has to take a big acton, and that the action has consequences. Those consequences are the source of your new pressure.

One more thing I should note: As the pressures escalate, you'll probably notice very quickly that things will build to the point where the entire world of your cast threatens to go nova. This is a good thing, and you should at least consider letting it.You are in the business of breaking stuff and finding out what people do afterwards. Be fearless about exploring what happens when everything implodes; the fact that you pushed it that far is a sign you're doing it right. Over-the-top is preferable to underwhelming. An author is a Shiva, a god of destruction - just keep in mind that Shiva destroys so that new things may come into being. So burn it all down, and see what springs up out of the ashes.

***

(Later still.)

Right. Now, a bit more about pressure:

As noted previously, a pressure doesn't have to be objectively big to be sufficient; it only has to be important enough to the characters. Of course, if the pressure involves a need or want for something with little or no significance outside the context of the story, you've got a Maguffin and a particular challenge in making the pressure believable. The Maltese Falcon and the One Ring are the standard classic examples of Maguffins, which just goes to show that it can be an effective device; another one I'm fond of is in Clive Barker's Tyl Eulenspiegel play Crazyface, set in a medieval world where the characters are willing to kill or die for the secret of making chocolate.

It probably goes without saying that pressures can be imposed from within as well, as long as there's something getting in the way of the character satisfying whatever need it is that's creating the pressure. Someone wants to do something they know they shouldn't ought to, or will be censured for, or will face the opposition of another character in; these all illustrate the dynamic that can happen very effectively between desires and obstacles to build pressure. Even boredom can be a source of pressure under the right circumstances (ask any Chekhov character), as long as you're dealing with the right combination of situation and personality to build up enough tension for something to need to happen.

The one thing that truly makes a source of pressure effective is a component of time. In some sense, the clock needs to be ticking down on the characters' situation, or they'll be able to sit it out as long as you can. Don't let them! Even if this time component is itself internally imposed - "that was the last straw, and I can't stand it a moment longer!" - the reader has to be ready to go along with the need for something to happen right now.

This points to another question it's useful to answer for yourself in creating Dramatic Plots: Why is this day different? What happens in the story you want to tell should be different in some significant way from any other day in the lives of your characters, and the sooner you get to that thing the better. That advice you've probably heard about tossing out the first three chapters of your novel, because that's where the real beginning is? Get to the Why Is This Day Different (and the pressure) right away and you won't have to. You don't have to linger over establishing your characters and setting nearly as much as you think you do; dive right into the Martian ship landing, or the caper that goes all wrong, or Johnny Poor Impulse Control finally getting restless enough to do something picturesque to Mr. Higgins.

If you're still stuck on how to jumpstart your plot: One of the best pieces of advice I've read on running roleplaying games is Attack the Party Right Away. If you're not familiar with RPGs, there's a danger at the start of every session where the players will want to wander and explore and get drnk and go gear-shopping before getting down to the business of going on the adventure, but if the gamemaster makes sure everyone gets in a fight right off the bat, this is not going to happen; what's more, the characters get a chance to interact immediately in a high-stakes situation, and you'll have the rapt attention of the players right from the beginning. The same principle works in prose fiction, too. Needless to say, the "fight" doesn't have to be a literal violent skirmish, but the idea of having a high-stakes conflict happen right away (or at least in the first few scenes) has broad application, and may give you additional ideas for building pressure and keeping it on.

One more thing bears mentioning. It's very popular for writers, especially young ones, to claim that their characters get away from them and run off with the plot. Of course, if you're enjoying where they go and the progress of events stays exciting - no worries, and more power to you. But if they're just being stubborn and short-circuiting the story, it's your job to assert authority as author and intoduce whatever pressure you need to get them back on track. Raise the stakes, set off new timebombs, send in two men with guns - do whatever you have to do to keep things moving and the pressure on. You are the author and you are in control, and if you need the characters to be in Cairo on the Equinox, it's your job to make sure the mule-headed little bastards get there on schedule.

NaNoSeconds, Part I

Most of my online writing these days, it seems, is on the NaNoWriMo fora, where, contrary to my presence almost everywhere else on Teh Internets, I can't seem to shut up. I have, indeed, been well-nigh pontificating on a number of writing-related subjects, for all that in measurable terms I have as much authorial cred as your average poetry.com prizewinner. But I've never let that sort of thing stop me before, and I'm not about to start learning humility now.

So, this being the case, I figured I may as well spread the ego-onanism around as much as I can manage before all my writerly energies are directed elsewhere, and I'm reposting some of my Collected Dubious Wisdom here. For posterity. Or something.

Anyway, this first one is from the Fantasy genre forum, where every year the NaNoZeitgeist seems to bring a new tide of neurosis about something or other; one year it was everyone worried about writing Mary Sues, and another it was avoiding cliches. This time around it's a sort of free-floating anxiety about what actually qualifies as Fantasy, and you can probably imagine about how much patience I have for that. It was quickly apparent that expecting my little screed be a preemptive strike against every young fantasist's genre dysphoria was too much to ask, but I suppose it was worth a try. So, then:

Some Not-Rules

In an effort, however futile, to hopefully forestall a tide of threads on some variant of "Does This Qualify As Fantasy Or Will The Genre Police Come Get Me In The Night," a few points bear making. Thus, a preliminary-if-of-necessity-incomplete list:

1. Not setting your novel on another world does not disqualify it as fantasy.

2. The absence of magic in your novel does not disqualify it as fantasy.

3. The absence of elves (dragons, unicorns, cockatrices, manticora, Generic Evil Hordes, or what-have-you) does not disqualify it as fantasy.

(3a. The absence of elves-as-rock-stars does not disqualify it as urban fantasy, but that's really another rant.)

4. The absence of epic quests, bildungsroman'd formerly-humble heroes, Feudalism Lite, and/or the stark division of the fictional cosmos into Good and Evil, singly or in any combination, does not disqualify it as fantasy.

5. The subtlety with which you treat the otherworldly element(s), whatever they may be (and however you want to stretch, bend, fold, or spindle the meaning of "otherworldly"), does not disqualify it as fantasy.

6. The presence of gunpowder, clockwork, the printing press, the seed drill, the steam engine, the incandescent lightbulb, or any other technology that would have given Paracelsus a headache does not disqualify it as fantasy.

7. The presence of rayguns, supercomputers, antigravity, faster-than-light travel, or any other fx-laden ultratech shininess does not disqualify it as fantasy.

8. The presence of elements, either of plot, style, or tone, normally associated with the various modes of Horror does not disqualify it as fantasy.

9. The use of any narrative or character voice other than the stentorian and faintly purple This Be a High and Valorous Narrative, Forsooth does not disqualify it as fantasy.

10. And so on. You get the idea.

...which is not to say, by the by, that there's anything at all wrong with doing fantasy that's Exactly What You'd Expect. This is not a discussion about cliches or the anxieties thereof, which is probably also worth having, but not on this thread, i'faith. If that's the book you're doing, you are almost certainly confident in its fantasyness, and this list is not about you.

This list is about everyone who approaches genre with a great idea dampened by fear of breaking the Rules.

And I am here to say: Cut it out. The Rules you're worried about don't exist, or they've been broken already so badly they might as well not. If you think you might be writing fantasy but are concerned that you're violating some sort of protocol if you deviate from the standard (whatever that is), I can give you a long list of folks who have already shattered those icons and danced among the shards.

(Oh, alright: Gene Wolfe. Jack Vance. Ellen Kushner. China Mieville. Kelly Link. Jeff Vandermeer. John Crowley. Sarah Monette. Garth Nix. Hal Duncan. And that's just for starters.)

Look: Genres (and subgenres) are not checklists, they're not pigeonholes, and they're most definitely not straightjackets. Genre is not prescriptive; when it works, it's descriptive, saying "If you liked that, you might also like this." (Or not.) Fantasy in particular is an elusive quarry, and changes shape as soon as you pin it down, but it's enough to say that it isn't only what's considered "generic." It probably has room for whatever it is you're doing too, so for the love of all the gods and muses, resist the urge to second-guess yourself on whether or not it "fits" and come let your work join the conversation already in progress. (And if you're still worried that it doesn't fall under the definition, consider the possibility that the definition could stand to be expanded; fantasy, of all the modes of Lit'rature, has enormous capacity to grow and include.)

Here endeth the ranting. Additions and expansions welcome.