Writing Process Blog Tour.

I've been tagged by Yvonne Hertzberger to be one of the next stops on the Writing Process Blog Tour. Thanks for the opportunity, Yvonne. And a hearty hearth/myth welcome to any newbies who have found their way here from her site.

By the way, Yvonne writes some pretty awesome epic fantasy; click on the Rursday Reads tab above and look for my reviews of her "Earth's Pendulum" series. She's also a fellow staffer at Indies Unlimited.

Now then, to the main event -- which is for me to answer the following four questions:

1. What are you working on?

Alert readers of hearth/myth already know that Scorched Earth will be the third and final book in my Land, Sea, Sky trilogy. What they don't know (because I just signed up yesterday) is that I've made this book my Camp NaNoWriMo project for next month. My outline is already done; I still need to fill in the pertinent dates on my dry-erase calendar, which I will do before I go to sleep tonight, and then I will be ready to kick this thing into overdrive on Tuesday.

2. How does your work differ from others of its genre?

This question assumes I've settled on a genre. The Pipe Woman Chronicles were easier -- Native American mythology + handsome shapeshifters = urban fantasy/paranormal romance. Land, Sea, Sky has some Native American mythology, but none of the sexy Plains tribes are involved; instead, Darrell is a Potawatomi Indian, a tribe which almost nobody has heard of, and his sponsoring deity (if you will) is the Ojibwe culture hero Nanabush. I've also got the Morrigan, who's the Celtic goddess of war and who is allied with Tess (to Tess's dismay); and Gaia, who is more or less a Wiccan Earth goddess, and whose human avatar is Sue. The plots of all these books involve a fair amount of intrigue and political maneuvering. So I'm calling the series contemporary fantasy.

If pressed, I'd compare Land, Sea, Sky to Neil Gaiman's American Gods, or to some of Charles de Lint's books. But my books are not enough like those to make a fair comparison. I don't really think anyone else is doing what I'm doing.

3. Why do you write what you do?

Because it interests me. I began studying various Pagan pantheons as part of my own spiritual journey several years ago, and I'd been reading up on Native American spirituality for many years before that. As a news reporter and editor, I spent a couple of decades covering politics (along with a whole bunch of other stuff). I've lived in all the places where the books in both of my series have been set (so far...).  And I read a lot of fantasy.

4. How does your writing process work?

I have discovered that I work best on deadline -- a holdover from my years in journalism. So the NaNoWriMo template seems to work best for me: I churn out a first draft of 50,000 words or so in three or four weeks. It's an intensive process, obviously. I don't have much of a life during the weeks when I'm writing the first draft; I typically spend several hours each night and all day on the weekends at the keyboard.

I do work from an outline, although it's a general, beat-style outline rather than a really detailed one. I write that, and I put the big events of the narrative on a dry-erase calendar that hangs above my desk, before I start writing the first draft. I also collect my research notes in a OneNote notebook. But that's pretty much it for my "writing process." Other than that, I just write.

Tag -- you're It!
The next thing I get to do is tag three authors to be the next stops on the Writing Process Blog Tour. They have all agreed to post their stuff by April 7th. Do stop by and visit them!

1. Laurie Boris

Laurie is a freelance writer, editor, proofreader, and former graphic designer. She has been writing fiction for over twenty-five years and is the award-winning author of four novels: The Joke's on Me, Drawing Breath, Don't Tell Anyone, and Sliding Past Vertical. When not playing with the universe of imaginary people in her head, she enjoys baseball, cooking, reading, and helping aspiring novelists as a contributing writer and editor for IndiesUnlimited.com. She lives in New York's lovely Hudson Valley.

2. John R. Phythyon, Jr.

John wishes he were a superhero or a magician, but since he has not yet been bitten by a radioactive spider or gotten his letter from Hogwarts, he writes adventure stories instead. He is the author of the Wolf Dasher series of fantasy-thriller mashup novels, as well as several short stories, a two-act comedy, and numerous game manuals. He won awards for the latter and hopes to make millions with the former.

In the meantime, he lives in Lawrence, Kansas with his wife, their children, a dog, and a cat. His current projects include the next novel in the Wolf Dasher series, world peace, and desperately wishing for the Cincinnati Bengals to win a Super Bowl before he dies.

3. Alesha Cary

Alesha Cary grew up reading mysteries and she still loves a good who-dunnit. But she's also a romantic at heart and believes we all deserve our own happily-ever-after -- we just have to find the right person. She writes her books with a bit of romance and a bit of mystery ~ and sometimes a splash of paranormal.

The mixture is different for each book, but you can expect to find some of each in every story.

Just like her characters, Alesha lives on the Pacific Northwest Coast with her husband and two cats. Their neighbors are deer, raccoons, skunks, foxes, mountain lions and bear, and far too many birds to list. From her window she gets to watch the whales playing as they migrate.

***
These moments of bloggy process -- or maybe it's processed blogginess? Anyway, here they are, brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.

Wherein we discuss magic realism, or: busted.

Here Comes the Flood - Rob Gonsalves

This is what happens when I shoot off my mouth.  I should know better by now.

On Friday, I wrote a little post for Indies Unlimited that was based a creative writing professor's takedown of another creative writing professor's comments about the current crop of creative writing students.

You with me so far?  Okay. To proceed, then:  The author of the original article was dismayed that his students don't read much in the way of contemporary literary fiction.  (Contemporary as in "written and published today," not necessarily as in "the setting of the story is the present day.")  The author of the article I mentioned in my IU post said that was a rotten idea.  He said basically that writers are a dime a dozen these days (and that is different from any other time in history how, exactly? But I digress...), and that creative writing programs are so successful in bringing lousy writers up to competency that it's natural for some of these barely competent writers to get published.  (My response to that is that if the gatekeepers are doing their jobs, then shouldn't the barely competent be rejected in favor of the extremely competent with some regularity?  But I digress again....)

Anyway, his point is that current literary fiction is banal at best, and not very good at worst -- and that writing students would be better off reading the best of any genre, not just the allegedly hoity-toity stuff.

Now that was a statement I could wrap a blog post around.  And so I did.  But then in that post, I made the mistake of referencing my famous rant about how magic realism is nothing but fantasy with an accent.

Karen Wyld, who is Aborigine and who writes magic realism, quite rightly took me to task for it.  Her post on her own blog in defense of magic realism is here.  It's terrific.  You should click through and read it.  But basically, she says (and I hope I don't get myself in trouble again for paraphrasing...) that magic realism grew out of the storytelling tradition, and that the genre was created by the dispossessed, or their descendants, as a way of explaining to others what they could not explain in any other way.  The magic in magic realism is intended to bring the reader into the writer's world, to let the reader feel what the writer feels about his or her lost land and way of life.

She's right, of course.  One need only think about books like Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate or Toni Morrison's Beloved, or anything by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and see how the magical events in these stories are there to evoke an emotional response in the reader.

But my original point was that the best fantasy writers do the same thing.  It's certainly true that a lot of them use magic simply as gee-whiz window dressing.  But the really good ones use it as a device to develop the characters' personalities and to underline their flaws -- and to evoke thereby a specific emotional response in the reader.  I keep going back to Stephen R. Donaldson because he's one of my favorite authors -- but he's one of my favorites because he's so damn good at this kind of thing.  Terisa Morgan surrounds herself with mirrors in order to convince herself that she's real; then a magic mirror becomes her portal to adventure and allows her to conquer her fear.  Thomas Covenant, stripped of everything that means anything to him, is brought to the Land, where he has unimaginable power that he never asked for and cannot bring himself to trust; he struggles to find a way to use this newfound power without betraying himself.

When I was in grad school, this frustrated me.  Any fantasy novel was dismissed as crap because, you know, it had magic in it.  But if a foreign author wrote a book that had magic in it, well, then, we can call it magic realism and it's okay to read -- the magic is there to explain why us white folks should feel bad about conquering these other cultures.  So it's not really magic -- it's a literary device.  It's allegory.  Or something.

It's insulting, is what it is: insulting to writers of both magic realism and serious fantasy.  Good writing is good writing, period.  Why we have to shove it into little labeled boxes and turn our noses up at one while lauding another escapes me.

Anyway, to be clear: magic realism isn't just fantasy with an accent.  But fantasy isn't dreck by definition, either.

***
In other news, and speaking of fantasy and Stephen R. Donaldson, I hope you saw my interview at John Pythyon's blog earlier this week.  It was a ton of fun to do, and I think it turned out really well.

And you may have already heard that I sent off Annealed to my editor last night.  Yay for progress!

***
This moment of bloggy clarification is brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.