On Being Detail-Oriented

One of the things I always tell people is that I'm very "detail-oriented."

For my fiction, this means that I research things almost constantly. I have a "Russian"* character in CALLARION AT NIGHT, so I looked up Russian speech patterns; recently I found a resource on writing the Irish accent without using dialect (needed for another character). I have books on architecture, weapons, Nazi thought, numerous printouts of baby names from various cultures, etc.

I also know the exact mph of a horse at a walk, trot, canter, and gallop -- information I used to calculate the distance between the cities of Haldor (the world of SON OF MAGIC). And did you know that the average person's walking speed is 2 to 3 miles per hour? That's another random tidbit of information you can use to calculate distance.

All of this translates (I hope) into stories with as few holes in the background as possible. I'm not a fan of the practice of "making it up" if you don't know it. Mostly because there's always someone out there who's going to call you on any bit of information you get wrong, no matter how small. This is why writing historical fiction is so hard. You have to get things dead-on accurate for your period or else the story doesn't work.

Same goes for any part of a fantasy/sci-fi story where you pull something from reality. It has to be accurate or it doesn't ring as factual, with the end result being you lost the reader. Probably the worst thing that can happen to a storyteller.

So, dear readers, I told you some of the research I've gathered. Now it's your turn. What's the weirdest tidbit you've ever had to look up for a story?

* The character isn't Russian per se, but he's from a country that's heavily based on Russia.

I Got A Feeling ....

That CALLARION AT NIGHT is pretty much the best story I've written thus far. Also, based on the response over Public Query Slushpile, I feel like this WIP (more than SON OF MAGIC) has a chance of actually getting published.

Granted, I've yet to finish my current (third) revision of the story and figure out which of several endings will work. Then there's beta readers and more rewrites, and so on and so forth. The entire process may take upwards of a year. Which I'm OK with. Because I'm confident this will be the one that passes muster.

Oh, and where am I on the revision (in case you're curious)? Wrapping up Chapter 7 (less than a third done with it, so I have awhile before I get to the beta reader point). Word count's at 21,318 right now -- roughly 75 pages -- and growing every day. With any luck, this draft will be wrapped up by Christmas. It might even get a bow on it.

Where Seldom Is Heard ...

... a discouraging word/and the skies are not cloudy all day. -- Home on the Range

Natalie Bahm's Wednesday post on encouragement and Bane of Anubis's Art Rant got me thinking about the benefits of encouragement and of critcism. I won't summarize either set of points, because you can just check out the original posts at the links above, but I do want to add something that would end up being too long for a comment on either one.

Encouragement and criticism both have their places in a writer's development. One, in my opinion, isn't worth the sweat off a dog's back without the other. If you receive too much encouragement and not enough criticism, you might potentially have an inflated sense of your own ability. Conversely, if you receive too much criticism and not enough encouragement, you end up second-guessing yourself so many times the universe will perish before you come to a decision (extreme example, yes I know).

There's this one writing group in my area, lead by a published author, whose focus is not on publication or anything of the sort. It's merely a venue for people to read from the stories they're working on and get (mostly) positive feedback. The last time I attended this group was more than three years ago because myself and the two other fantasy authors in there spun off into the awesome crit group we have now.

This type of encouragement is good ... to a point. You need the person who's going to give your MS back dripping with red ink because they're the only ones who are going to tell you what is and is not working in the text. The above writers' group is good for those who aren't ready for this type of criticism. And it is something you have to be ready for. Otherwise you might end up just getting depressed instead of taking the comments for what they are.

Then you get into the "artistes" of the world who've received universal encouragement from their little circle of influence, or been in a place where what they create tends toward being better than the limited creative types they have contact with. These people may have an ego the size of the Sears Tower and be convinced, through the "yes" men/women around them, that they don't need criticism.

Artistes tend to look down on the folks in the trenches who are aiming toward publication. And could use a page dripping with red ink the most as a reality check, but they're also the most likely to say "oh you just don't understand my work." Said comment means two things a) they think you're a Philistine and b) you just wasted your time trying to be helpful.

Critique helps make creative types better. There's no two ways about it. Having your work deconstructed in front of your eyes and shone where it could be improved is sometimes energizing, especially because the person doing this loved (or disliked) your story/song/painting enough to take the time to think about it. Which is what we all want to have, methinks.

And remember, critique can also be a form of encouragement. If it's worded properly, of course.

The Slums of Victorian London

"Wretched houses with broken windows patched with rags and paper; every room let out to a different family, and in many instances to two or even three – fruit and ‘sweetstuff’ manufacturers in the cellars, barbers and red-herring vendors in the front parlours, cobblers in the back; a bird-fancier in the first floor, three families on the second, starvation in the attics, Irishmen in the passage, a ‘musician’ in the front kitchen, a charwoman and five hungry children in the back one – filth everywhere – a gutter before the houses, and a drain behind – clothes drying, and slops emptying from the windows; ... men and women, in every variety of scanty and dirty apparel, lounging, scolding, drinking, smoking, squabbling, fighting, and swearing."

Charles Dickens, Sketches by Boz, 1839, on St Giles Rookery

Calling the slums of Victorian London a dirty place is like saying eating forty Twinkies a day is bad for you. The above quotation from Mr. Dickens is indicative of the type of place most of the poorest denizens of the city lived in. We're talking conditions roughly equivalent to many Third World countries, but existing in the center of the most powerful country in the world at the time.

The poor lived in brownstone tenements and rickety shacks, some next to the Thames, which was a stinking cesspool of pollution that smelled worse than a decaying corpse when the summer heat got too bad. It didn't help that the mills and factories turning London into a capital of Industry and Progress, places that many of these poor worked, were the causes of the vast amounts of filth poured into the river day in and day out.

Sanitation might as well have been nonexistent in these areas. Hector Gavin wrote a set of "Sanitary Ramblings" focused on Bethnal Green (an area in the contemporary London borough of Tower Hamlets) in 1848, and revealed that the section had "thirty-three miles of streets and 100 miles of byeways, not counting the length of courts and alleys, which require drainage." Guess how many miles of sewer this 759-acre area had.

Less than seven and three-quarters.

Gavin goes on to explain that the main street through the district had no sewer at all for 1,600 yards of its length, and a mile and a half of the sewers Bethnal Green did have also served the areas of London to the north and south. And none of the sewers connected directly to any of the houses. Because of this, repeated outbreaks of diseases like cholera, typhus, influenza and scarlatina were commonplace.

So common were these outbreaks that Henry Mayhew in 1849 christened the south shore of the Thames with the name "Pestilensia." These same diseases hit the same areas of the city every year, with the only change being the end of the street that the disease started on.

These slums were the basis for both the Lowtown and Quayside districts of Callarion -- the city CALLARION AT NIGHT takes place in -- without getting into a lot of the gritty detail that the social critics of Victorian London did. Because while it creates realism, a lot of the info is extraneous to the story I'm trying to tell.

Like the Logo?

You might have noticed the logo this here blog's now sporting on the right side of the screen. Weeelll it just so happens that I was reading Quest:Published, and noticed that L.T. Host regularly calls her readers the Alliterati. I then got really, really, really bored at my part-time job one night and decided I was going to create an Alliterati logo (interesting things happen when Matthew gets bored).

So I used Adobe Illustrator and my mad skillz (not really) taken from spending two years as a page designer for a daily newspaper company to throw a logo together for "The Society of the Alliterati." Hence the logo goodness.

Oh, and check out L.T.'s site. She has a Mad-Libs recurring feature using news stories as the base paragraphs. The results are entertaining to say the least.

Word Choice and Slang

One of the bigger problems I have with writing semi-period pieces (i.e. Steampunk set at a particular societal level) is that I have to find slang words that fit the story. Things like the word "Hey!" and "Oi!" might not work as exclamations to get someone's attention because they sound too modern.

So I end up trolling the dictionary for words that are at least as old as the time period my stories roughly take place in. With CALLARION AT NIGHT, that means going for Victorian England. With SON OF MAGIC (my completed MS), I have to aim for either creating my own words or using ones that have etymologies at least back to the 14th Century. That way I can be certain of the word not pulling people out of the story.

This can be crazy-making sometimes, especially when my crit group finds a word and says "That's too modern." And then I go back to the drawing board (mind you, I adore my critique group -- they're a talented bunch that have laser-guided eyesight for each class of my traditional errors. And they put up with me taking the proverbial red pen to their works. So I'm happy.).

I know I'm not the only one who has this problem (Gary, I'm looking at you), but I'm curious about how other writers of historical fiction/fantasy deal with the word choice issue.

A Series of Steampunkery -- The Introduction

So my definition post on Steampunk was well-received enough that I decided to turn it into an occasional series chronicling the development of a steampunk world. Specifically the one in CALLARION AT NIGHT, my in-revisions WIP.

Steampunk, as it was originally used, forced writers to compose their tales in an alternate version of Victorian London (or any city of that era, though London was most common) because that's when steam was really King of the World. H.G. Wells and Jules Verne were the prototypes for these writers, with their advanced science and gleaming crystalline, copper, and brass machinery. The other concession made sometimes involved the theory that some form of computing power existed -- whether it was Babbage's Analytical Engine (THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling) or something different.

Then a subset of this fiction started happening where the time period was either far-future after a devastating war (FITZPATRICK'S WAR by Theodore Judson) or, as in my WIP, a fantasy world that has little to no relation to our own. These secondary stories sometimes eschewed the dystopian elements of the prototypical steampunk works, instead weaving steam technology into fantasy settings while still potentially maintaining the ability to have magic (an example escapes me right now).

I'll close this entry before it gets too long with a brief list of some subject areas I researched to craft the world of CALLARION AT NIGHT:

Slums of Victorian London
19th Century British and American weapons
19th Century consumer goods
Steam engines
Thermodynamics
19th Century Russian culture
European peerage
Early automobiles
Early armored vehicles
Cannons
Capsaicin (the chemical in chili peppers)

Odd list, yes I know, but I promise it will make some sort of sense eventually. I hope so at least.