nanowrimo

It’s the most glorious month of the year again! And I’ve been making preparations. Write-ins have been scheduled. Chocolate has been stockpiled. My spreadsheet is filling out. As our reading week (a week’s holiday) falls conveniently in November, I’ll be taking ten days off to do nothing but write. I’ve found that I need to build momentum in the first days of Nanowrimo to carry me through the rest, so as soon as the clock hits midnight tonight, I’ll open up my shiny new Word document and start writing.

This year I’m taking a second crack at my YA urban fantasy DREAD MACHINE. I’m aiming to kill this scarily huge project in 100k max. If I’m especially good, I might even beat last year’s total. I hope the tiramisu of victory is in my future!

Are you doing Nanowrimo this year? How have you been preparing?

back from the dead

Since my last post, I turned in my final-year research project, scraped through my final exams, graduated from university, scored a place at University College London to study MA Publishing, narrowly missed out on a scholarship, found a house in London, got a summer job and applied for a terrifyingly huge bank loan to afford all this, read a lot, wrote a lot, and somehow survived.

How about you? :)

theme song

Frivolous post today. I often play music while I’m writing, but the aim is for the music to fade into the background, so I’ve never really thought of any one song as a theme song. The one exception is Within Temptation’s “Hand of Sorrow”. From the moment I first heard this, way back when IRONBANE was still coming together, I knew this was the perfect song for protagonist Anjen, the war she fought and the things she did to win.

Please forgive me for the sorrow
For leaving you in fear
For the dreams we had to silence
That's all they'll ever be
Still I'll be the hand that serves you
Though you'll not see that it is me

So many dreams were broken and so much was sacrificed
Was it worth the ones we loved and had to leave behind
So many years have past, who are the noble and the wise?
Will all our sins be justified?

seven years

Lately I’ve been thinking about my history as a writer. Past novels, past writing groups, past critique partners. What kicked me off was a comment on last week’s teaser from my old friend John Zeleznik, better known to me as Ebenstone.

"Your writing has gotten so good. This was beautiful and so well written. I'm blown away!"

I’ve been lucky enough to stay in touch with many of my old writing friends. I’m still swapping chapters with Dystophil the way we did three years ago. But Ebenstone is hands down the oldest writing friend I’m still in touch with. How old? I joined our then writing group in late 2002, when I’d just turned fourteen. So -- seven years and counting.

In those seven years, I wrote:

• Some embarrassingly terrible stuff ripped off from Tamora Pierce.
• Some embarrassingly terrible stuff ripped off from Robert Jordan.
• Some embarrassingly terrible stuff ripped off from George RR Martin.
• Three hundred pages of world-building for a projected multiple-book series I had to tear up.
• Fanfiction in several fandoms.
• My first novel, an epic fantasy I have since thankfully lost.
• My second novel, a monster novel I have unfortunately not lost, because it is saved on my writing LJ.
• My third novel, an urban fantasy I often wished I’d lost.
• My fourth novel, an epic fantasy I love too much to lose.

Objectively I think, and Dystophil often tells me, that my writing has improved a metric truckload since the early days. But only Ebenstone knows the truth.

So I’m glad to hear that I’ve learned something in those seven years. :)

ego defence, or: where can I get me a case of special snowflake syndrome?

Via the wonderful Beth Bernobich, I’ve been thinking about Ann Leckie’s idea of the ego defence. She suggests that the writer’s typical defensive reaction to criticism -- what I think of as special snowflake syndrome, the assertion that your work is perfect and the critic is wrong or mean or stupid to say otherwise -- is an ego defence. Interestingly, while I think of special snowflake syndrome as exclusively negative, Ann Leckie calls this ego defence useful:

you don't want to succumb to despair right off the bat. You want to keep plugging away, and getting better [...] and sometimes the only way to do that and keep your sanity is to not have an entirely accurate view of the quality of your work ...

I find this fascinating, because I don’t have an ego defence as I understand it: all I have is the you-suck soundtrack, and it’s playing particularly loudly at the moment. It’s tricky to write anything when some Tuesdays you can’t come up with a single scene worth reading across the entire spectrum of your several novels. Not one. (That stings.)

Special snowflakes are armoured in the conviction that they’re awesome. They don’t have criticism written on the inside of their skull in letters of fire. They can write easily, because everything they write will of course be genius.

Must be nice.

I’d quite like to be a little more of a snowflake. My ego could use defences.

the psychology of bullying scenes, or: hug a bully today

Someone behind Alanna grabbed her. She spun. A tall, gangling boy of nearly fourteen looked her over, a sneer on his thick mouth. He had cold blue eyes and sandy-blond hair that flopped over his forehead.

"I wonder what this is." His crooked teeth made him spit his s's. Alanna wiped a drop of saliva from her cheek. "Probably some back-country boy who thinks he's a noble."

- from Tamora Pierce’s Alanna: The First Adventure, first book in the Song of the Lioness Quartet

Bullies. They’re everywhere. They insult Tamora Pierce’s Alanna of Trebond, they gang up on George RR Martin’s Jon Snow, they appear in at least half the works posted on the Young Writers’ Society. Whenever I read a bullying scene, I get a surge of indignation. Not for the victims -- for the bullies.

Victims are protagonists, they get names, faces and personalities, the reader is intended to sympathise with them. Bullies are stock characters imported straight from the Department of Manufactured Conflict: cardboard cut-outs, often unnamed, rarely characterised. Victims are lone heroes; bullies are cowards, so they hunt in packs. Victims get snappy comebacks; bullies whine and sneer. (Note how the bully in the Tamora Pierce scene is described as ugly. Remember, kids: ugliness = evil!) If victims don’t triumph now, winning over spectators in the process, they’ll get public and humiliating revenge later. Bullies remain despicable characters throughout the narrative, despised by the readers, the author and the other characters, unless the victim wins even them over with their awesomeness.

Poor bullies, they never win.

The classic lone victim vs multiple bullies scenario has power because it taps into a ton of underlying assumptions, myths and values:

• We admire the loner. Loners are powerful as individuals; only weak people and cowards, like bullies, have to co-operate.
• Bullies invariably provoke the conflict. They attack out of the blue, without provocation. This taps into the classic victim complex, the feeling of being unjustly treated. Real-world conflicts are much more nuanced; the victim in a bullying scene, and by extension the reader, doesn’t need to feel any guilt or reservations about their part in a conflict, because they’re clearly in the right.
• We see standing up against others as courageous. I wonder if this reflects a hostility to authority. Do bullies represent a tyrannical force the everyman hero has to resist?
• Faceless, nameless, characterless bullies are easy to read. They’re bad. They’re not like us. We can hate them without any reservations. Well-drawn bullies with genuine motivations for their actions are more challenging because they’re more like us. Could we be bullies? If we were in their situation, what would we do?
• Bullying justifies the victim’s retaliation. Under normal circumstances you can’t punch somebody who annoys you, but retaliatory violence by the victim against the bully is seen as fair, even where the violence seems disproportionate. I recently critiqued a story in which the protagonist permanently crippled a bully, ripping out his magic while he begged for mercy. The author and all the characters seemed to think that maiming is a justified response to bullying.
• Readers of the fantasy novels I’m talking about tend to be bookish people and/or geeks who were bullied for real as children. There’s a reason Snacky’s Law is so commonly invoked -- the same reason I noted so many bullying scenes posted on the Young Writers' Society forums. Bullying scenes are a way to safely re-enact the trauma of being bullied, with ourselves as sympathetic victims, leading to our retaliation against the bullies and our ultimate triumph. Fantasy ranter Limyaael, whose awesomeness I can only hope to emulate, complained in her “Author’s Darling” rant:

I often feel faintly sick when, reading through a fantasy story, I realize that the author is ... taunting the bullies who tormented her in high school. She doesn't want to actually talk to these people, or perhaps they're in the past, dead or out of contact, and she can't. So she takes the chance to create a character who's her, put her through the same situation, and say, "Nah-nah-nah-boo-boo!"

So I can see why writers resort to bullying scenes. It’s a cheap and easy way of building reader sympathy, and your typical reader is disposed to like and sympathise with victims of bullying. But I hate the lack of motivation. Why do bullies never have a legitimate reason to bully the protagonist? Forget legitimate, any reason would be a plus. Has the protagonist never done anything, accidentally or deliberately, or been thought to do something, that might make the bully want to get their own back? Does the protagonist always have to be 100% squeaky-clean and the bully 100% randomly malicious to ensure reader sympathy falls into its proper place? (God forbid that the reader should ever rethink who deserves their sympathy.)

In the George RR Martin example I mentioned above, teenage viewpoint character Jon Snow is the bastard son of a noble, despised by commoners and nobles alike. Thanks to his privileged upbringing in his father’s castle, Jon is an excellent swordsman and mercilessly thrashes his opponents in training, humiliating them to the point that four of them ambush him in an armoury to get their own back. Jon is working through the justified retaliation part of the bullying cliche when -- I love Martin so much -- somebody actually calls Jon out on his behaviour: Jon is using his privilege to unfairly and unnecessarily humiliate his peers, and if he keeps harbouring a raging victim complex, none of them are ever going to learn to work together. And it will be entirely his fault.

I was so thrilled I nearly cried.

Another example of effective bullying: the pilot episode of the TV series Merlin. The pilot episode features teenage Merlin interfering to protect a servant from a bullying lord. Merlin is promptly thrown in jail, then in the stocks. What saves this scene? The bully is Arthur freaking Pendragon. The hero is a bully. Arthur is handsome, snarky, ridiculously heroic -- and a self-centred ass. I love Arthur, and I love that they had the nerve to make their hero bully someone in his opening scene.

Suggestions for writing bullying scenes?

1. The purpose should not be to glorify the protagonist. Nor to make him look good in comparison to the evil bully.
2. Bullies need a good reason to bully. Stereotypically evil motivations like “He’s just jealous of the protagonist” aren’t good enough.
3. It is not open season on bullies. If someone makes insulting comments about the protagonist’s mother, the protagonist cannot legitimately chainsaw him to death.
4. It’s okay for the protagonist not to be squeaky-clean all the time.
5. Do not resort to making your victims beautiful and your bullies ugly as a cheap shorthand for good and evil. I swear, if I read another bullying scene in which the bully’s ugliness is lovingly described (like that Tamora Pierce scene) as a symbol of their nastiness, I will hunt someone down.
6. Therapy for the writer =/= effective fiction for the reader.
7. Don’t despise your own characters. It always shows.

(I enjoyed playing a little with bullying in THE INFERNAL FAMILY. My protagonist is continually harassed by his partner slash love interest, who thinks he’s a violent psychopath and kind of dumb as well -- all of which is absolutely true.)

What do you think? Have you noticed trends in bullying scenes in books or unpublished work? Can you improve on my analysis or my suggestions?

Further reading: Limyaael, “Breathing life into bullies”.

revenge of the prologue rant

I hate prologues. Out of the hundreds (perhaps more) of prologues I've read, I only remember two of them fondly: Scott Lynch and Joe Abercrombie are the authors who stole my heart. The vast, vast majority of them suffer from some or all of the following problems:

• Are used as an excuse for appalling infodumps. Huge quantities of information are crammed in with very little attempt to craft an actual story.
• Depict a long-ago historical event the author wrongly thinks we need to see up-front to understand the story.
• Feature a generic evil overlord being generically evil. He burns villages, he tortures people, he kicks the dog. Yawn.
• Attempt to be ominous yet unspecific by using painfully cliched language of foreboding: "Something terrible is coming." / "Yes, and a hero must rise to deal with it, but I fear he will succumb to the madness in his soul." (I don't understand why people ever bother with ominous vagueness when it's so obvious they're referring to the protagonist.)
• Show the special events of the special protagonist's special birth. Apart from the cliche, this supports the tired idea that everything special about a person is inherited from their equally special daddy. Alas, poor meritocracy, we knew ye well.
• Are completely unnecessary.
• Try to persuade us to get emotionally invested in the characters, even though we all know that prologue characters won't recur - whether they die at the end or are historical characters or aren't important at all except for the special baby.
• Don't even bother trying to persuade us that there's something here worth investing in emotionally.
• Tell us things that don't become relevant for another 80,000 words, by which time we've forgotten what happened.
• Are obvious ripoffs of other stories.
• At the end, rip the reader out of that scene and dump them into chapter one, frequently with absolutely zero continuity of time, place, plot or character. (I complained about this in my review of the pilot of TV series Sanctuary.)

If I could write the One Law to Rule them All, I'd probably rule that:

1. Prologues cannot contain more than 50 words of exposition at a time. Period.
2. Special protagonist's special birth prologues are banned.
3. Generic evil overlord prologues are banned.
4. Prophecies? Totally banned.
5. Ominous vaguery is not interesting.
   
6. Readers need some continuity. The prologue and first chapter should be obviously linked: the same characters, or the same setting, or the same subjects, etc.
7. At least one named character with an actual personality must feature.
   
8. Thinking, feeling, angsting, expositing, world-building, reflecting on backstory and navel-gazing of all types must be balanced with dialogue, action and character interaction.
   

Nearly all prologues I've read have been disastrous.

But when I reread the prologue of Best Served Cold, I remember how enormously I love it. :)

new year's resolutions for 2010

1. Graduate.
2. Start a publishing masters course.
3. Query THE INFERNAL FAMILY.
4. Revise IRONBANE.
5. Finish the first draft of DREAD MACHINE.
6. Panic less.

2009 writing year in review

I feel like a humiliating failure, so it’s surprising to look back on everything I’ve done in the last twelve months and say: 2009 has been a kickass writing year.

A year ago I was desperate. I hadn’t finished a novel in two and a half years. I’d put eighteen months, many bitter tears and at least 50k into my third novel, then titled EMPIRE OF HEAVEN, by the time I realised it was irreparably broken. Real writers knocked out a novel a year: I was a loser, a poser and a failure. I had a month’s Easter holiday in March, and if I couldn’t finish my novel in an entire month of writing full-time, I might as well give up.

Happily for my continued self-esteem, I ripped out the genre, setting and antagonist, rewired with new stuff, hammered out about 30k in less than a fortnight and finished what was recognisably THE INFERNAL FAMILY at the beginning of April. Narrow escape there.

Since my writing career consists of short bursts of writing interspersed with long stretches of doom, I spent the next six months ripping my hair out over revisions. I also wrote a query that everyone loved, workshopped the first chapter until it begged for mercy, and worked on my sweet and well-behaved epic fantasy IRONBANE. But mainly I whined a lot.

As Nanowrimo bore down on me like a freight train, I scrabbled to get a beta draft of THE INFERNAL FAMILY done and out to beta readers. I think I emailed it out with shaking hands at one minute to midnight on the last day of October. I even made the tiramisu of glory, my long-promised reward! Then I kicked Nanowrimo’s ass: hammering out over 75,000 words, finishing IRONBANE and kicking off my YA urban fantasy, DREAD MACHINE.

This story would threaten to have a happy ending were it not for realising that everything I’ve written needs to be insulted, ripped up and then burned.

So I guess I ended the year exactly where I started: swimming in a lake of despair near Mount Doom. Except this year I’m two first drafts, a second draft and a query to the good. I call that a win. :)

stages of competence, the dunning-kruger effect, and what they mean for writers

Struggling today, so I'll cheer myself up with one of my favourite topics: stages of competence and the Dunning-Kruger effect. (I like this topic because it tells me that the worse I feel about my writing, the more awesome I secretly am.)

The stages of competence theory states that when you try to learn a new skill, you progress through four predictable stages:

1. Unconscious incompetence. You're bad at the new skill, but because you're so new, you lack appreciation of just how bad you are.
   
2. Conscious incompetence. You're starting to learn the new skill, and you're beginning to appreciate that you're not very good at it.
   
3. Conscious competence. You've learned to be good at the new skill if you work very hard.
   
4. Unconscious competence. You've internalised your new skill to the point where it's second nature.

Let's apply this theory to a skill we might be learning ... like, say, writing.

You start out as a wide-eyed newbie. You've banged out a first draft and you think it's the best thing since sliced bread. Because you don't understand the mechanics of writing, you can't see why your work is bad (unconscious incompetence). In your puppy-like enthusiasm, you join a bunch of critique groups and throw your work up, expecting everyone to see awesomeness - just like you do.

Except nobody thinks it's awesome. You have the sobering experience of realising that your work may not be very good at all (conscious incompetence). Actually, it's terrible.

How do you get better? What is better, exactly? Will you ever get to stage 3, conscious competence? How long will it take?

You've entered the yawning chasm of stage 2.

Similarly, the Dunning-Kruger effect states that the unskilled lack the awareness to know just how bad they are - so they consistently and strongly overrate themselves in that skill. Conversely, the highly skilled underrate themselves. They know how much they have still to learn.

Morals of the story:

1. If a harsh light has dawned and you now see that your work is terrible, you've moved up a stage of competence. Yes, it hurts.
2. If you lack confidence in your work, you're in a better position to improve than someone who thinks their work is perfect.
3. When I tear my hair out and swear never to write again, it secretly means I'm awesome. Really.
   

things I'll never win prizes for

Things I'll never win prizes for:

1. Beautiful prose.
2. Literary merit.
3. Originality.
4. Plot.

That said, when I reread THE INFERNAL FAMILY today, I liked it. In a clunkily written, non-literary, unoriginal, poorly plotted way. :)

teaser tuesday

Teaser from my urban fantasy, THE INFERNAL FAMILY. Protagonist Johann is back in the wreckage of his home to pick up the body of his murdered son.

(Here be bad language.)

*

By night the hall glittered with broken glass, smeared with blood gone black, the carpet stiff underfoot. It looked unreal enough that he could pretend not to recognise it. Must have been somebody else who’d let his son die here.

A trail of black footprints led upstairs.

“You put him to bed?” Nicholas said.

“I couldn’t leave him there.” His voice cracked for some stupid reason. “Not on the floor.” Like an unwanted thing, a toy Johann’d ditched when it broke.

He went upstairs. If he didn’t touch the footprints it wouldn’t be the same as before, as the weight of his son curled in his arms, fingers slipping from his shirt. So he could look into Marcus’ room and not see --

Johann stopped, feet stuck, couldn’t take another step. Nicholas said “What?” and looked over his shoulder, and went silent.

The body lay curled under the duvet, hair fair against the pillow. Johann couldn’t look at it, but it kept dragging his eyes back, displacing his memory of cradling his warm living son. Marcus couldn’t be a huddled thing under a duvet, dead long enough to stiffen, he’d been bright and brave and alive and this wasn’t real, Johann refused to let it be. He wanted Marcus back.

“When I first took Marcus in he, he wouldn’t sleep in the room I gave him.” The words spilled out, even though it was a stupid story and Nicholas hated personal stuff. “I’d find him curled up in a chair in the morning looking miserable. I thought maybe I was doing something wrong, maybe he was scared of me or something -- But later I found out his dad walked out on him. Just left one night and never came back. So he only wanted to sleep somewhere where I’d wake him if I left.”

God, Johann’d been so scared back then. Scared of hurting him. Scared of him leaving. Scared of this fierce need to protect him. It didn’t make any sense that Marcus would want to stay, and every time Marcus crept sleepily under his arm and tucked his fair head under his chin Johann thought it’d be the last.

“He never does that any more. Did. And I left him today. I left him while he was sleeping. What if he wasn’t really dead yet, what if he woke up and I was gone, and he thought I walked out on him, I didn’t want him any more --“

The words were running down into useless babble, so he stopped. It wasn’t right that he’d survived.

“Stark,” Nicholas said awkwardly behind him. Johann reached out and took hold of his arm without looking, grip too tight but not caring about hurting him, and just -- focused on what was real. What mattered. Not this thing that wasn’t his son.

“Let’s just get this over with,” Johann said.

Something moved downstairs.

Both of them froze. Streetlights poured between the open curtains, a tide of orange creeping across the bedcovers, Johann felt trapped in amber.

The silence resounded. Maybe he’d imagined the sound. He was already losing his mind, it wouldn’t be a big leap from there to hearing things --

A door shut.

Hunters. In his home. Where they’d murdered his son.

Everything else slipped through his fingers. Fury fired up, hot and savage, settling in the pounding of his blood and the curling of his hands into fists.

When he went for the stairs Nicholas barred his way, knife already drawn, light jumping along the edge. “Could be anyone. Neighbour. Police. Drunk idiots who --“

Johann slammed him aside and took the stairs three at a time. Empty of people, the skeleton of the house passed by in a blur, the walls its bones, doorways gaping like sockets. A shadow moved in the kitchen -- Johann burst into the kitchen feeling alive and full of fire, smashed aside the hunter’s pathetic attempts to defend himself and threw him into a kitchen cabinet.

Wood splintered. Glass rattled in its frames. The hunter fell onto the counter in a cascade of cabinet wreckage, rolled off the counter clutching his ribs, slid to the floor. Johann flexed his hands and the fresh cuts on his knuckles stung; he liked that, proof that he could still hurt people.

The kitchen was a mystery now, shadowed and streetlit, no longer home. “Marcus and I used to cook here,” Johann told the hunter conversationally, hauling him off the floor. “I was never any good at it, but Marcus enjoyed it. Flour everywhere.” Marcus used to sit at the kitchen table and reread the recipe with furrowed brow, ticking off with mathematical precision things he’d already added. For a moment Johann pictured him there, real enough to reach out and touch.

Johann slammed the hunter onto that table so hard something broke, wood or bone, he didn’t care. The hunter choked and couldn’t scrabble out of his grip. “Doesn’t happen any more. Since you killed him.” He flung the pathetic human down with a snarl. “My boy was smart. Aced all his exams, he liked studying, he wanted to go to university. He could’ve done, I would’ve figured something out, I -- He used to sit right here.” Johann broke that chair with his hands, sudden bunch of muscles, satisfying smash. Another memory broken.

The hunter gripped the counter and pulled himself off the floor. His other hand skittered out for a kitchen knife.

Johann didn’t care. “Go ahead. You should have killed me instead, I would’ve let you, why would I care, he was just a kid, he was my son --“

The hunter smashed a jar in his face. It spilled white, the stuff got in his eyes and burned. Salt. Then the hunter slashed him across the ribs -- shocking cold at first, then the cut burned, warmth seeping through his shirt.

Johann hit the bastard in the face and rocked him back against the counter. The bloody knife Johann ripped out of his hand; he wanted to stab and stab but that would be too quick, Marcus had suffered before he died. Johann slashed him instead, going for his face but catching his upflung arm, cutting and cutting, red lines running down and blood smearing everywhere, the taste of salt in his mouth and stinging his eyes --

“Stark, what the fuck are you doing?”

He spun and Nicholas stood in the doorway, cold and stern and out of reach, and for a second Johann choked on the red urge to hurt him.

“What is wrong with you?” Nicholas demanded, his accent sliding into a vicious extreme. “You can hear him screaming from outside the house. So can all the neighbours you just woke up, and so will all the police they just called, who will find us in a ruined house with a corpse!”

His heart hammered, the knife slash stinging, hands slippery with blood. Nicholas always talked too much, stupid words that meant nothing. “Scared?” Johann threw back at him.

Nicholas narrowed his eyes. “Give me that knife.”

The hunter slipped as he tried to get up. Johann stamped him down, fury hot and blind, wanting to smash him into a red pulp he could squeeze through his fingers. “No.”

“Then I’m taking it off you.”

“This is what you do to things that scare you, isn’t it.” Johann lifted the knife, liking his sudden tenseness, not quite a flinch. “You get in their faces and dare them to hurt you. Like you did to the angel.”

“Go ahead.” Nicholas stepped right in, startlingly close. “Dare you.”

prophecy, or: how to rob your protagonist of agency

Prophecy: I hate it.

Hero’s Journey fantasies love this trope. The young protagonist discovers he’s prophesied to bring down the Dark Lord. Unfortunately, the Dark Lord now knows about him too, and unleashes his +2 Storm of Wrath on our luckless protagonist. Standing in the smouldering ruins of his home village, ideally on the graves of his parents, the protagonist vows vengeance. He’ll take down that dastardly Dark Lord or die trying!

This is also the reason why half the Hero’s Journey fantasies on my shelf have dented corners -- I threw them against the wall.

Here are my problems with the traditional use of prophecy in fantasy:

1. Prophecy makes the story predictable. If it’s prophesied that the protagonist will overcome the Dark Lord, we know that’s exactly what will happen. No suspense, no surprise, no excitement.
2. Since we’ve been told how the story will go, we’re ahead of the plot and waiting impatiently while the reluctant hero tries to refuse the call. It’s obvious to everyone except the protagonist that that’s not going to happen. He’s going to be railroaded into his prophesied role whether he likes it or not.
3. It’s a not-very-veiled form of authorial intrusion. Consider where prophecy comes from: the gods, fate or destiny -- ie. authorial intent.
4. We read fiction for compelling characters who must take drastic action to overcome conflict. If their actions are dictated by prophecy, not choices that they themselves make, they’re just a puppet.

Soon: uses of prophecy I’ve enjoyed reading; things I’d like to see done with prophecy.

week zero: freshers' week

It's week zero, and as I head back to real-life university, I'll also be studying my real passion - how to create a good fantasy novel.

The bibliography: authors from Abercrombie to Zelazny. The schedule: three times a week I'll blog about what I'm reading, writing and learning. The final project: my ongoing novel, which is languishing at a 3rd when it needs to climb the dizzy heights of a 1st.

I have a lot to learn. ;)