Auntie Deborah Answers Your Questions About Writing

In this installment, Auntie Deborah discusses writing a first draft, the unfairness of publishing, and when to run away from a publisher's contract. 

Dear Auntie Deborah: How can I prevent myself from constantly trying to edit as I draft?

Auntie Deborah: You’re halfway there in understanding why it’s important to plough through that draft so you can look at the whole thing when it’s time to revise. It’s tempting but (for many of us) deadly to halt forward progress and nitpick. Here are a few strategies that have worked for me:

• Beginning each session with reading the last page or so but not making any changes in it.
• Reminding myself that the only draft that counts is the one on my editor’s desk. And that what looks like an error may point me in the direction of a deeper, richer story, so I need to preserve all that drek the first time through.
• Reminding myself about author B, whose work I greatly admire, who told me that no one, not even her most trusted reader, sees anything before her third draft.
• Giving myself permission to be really, really awful.
• Falling in love with the revision process. I can hardly wait to get that first draft down so I have something to play with.
• Writing when I’m tired. Believe it or not, this helps because it’s all I can do then to keep putting down one word after another.

All that said, sometimes editing is the right thing, like when it feels as if I’m pushing the story in a direction it doesn’t want to go, or I’ve written myself into a hole I can’t dig out of. Usually that means I’ve made a misstep earlier, not thought carefully about where I want to go. Or whatever I thought the story was about, I was wrong, and the true story keeps wanting to emerge. How do I tell when this is the case? Mostly experience, plus willingness to rip it all to shreds and start over.

Dear Auntie Deborah: How do you come up with names for your characters?

Auntie Deborah: Sometimes the novel and its setting dictate parameters for last names. For example, if I’m writing a science fiction novel about Scottish colonists on Mars, I’m going to look at Scottish last names.

Often the character herself will suggest a last name, either based in ethnicity or personal traits and history. An aging hippie might have changed their last name to Sunchild or Windflower or Yogananada. A family trying to erase immigrant origins might have a last name like Smith or Jones.

And then there’s the telephone book (do such things still exist?) Or the credits for a really big movie, the ones that go one for screen after screen after screen. Do be careful when using real last names, though. If they’re too different, they might be identifiable. Just use the lists as prompts for your thinking.

Another strategy is to look at first names and then use them as last names. (My middle name is Jean, which was my mother’s last name, so the reverse could also be true.)

That said, always do an internet search for the name you’ve chosen. Even if you aren’t aware of others with that name, it’s good to know.

The Seven-Petaled Shield - More Early Opening Chapter

For your reading pleasure, here is the second part of a very early opening chapter to The Seven-Petaled Shield. I've left it just as I wrote it, without attempting to bring spelling, name usage, place names, and the like, into congruence with the final, edited version. For myself, I find it fascinating to see how an author develops the characters and story. I hope this is interesting and rewarding to you, too.

This is one of several sketches and out takes, which will be archived under "Read A Story" as I post them here.

You can buy the book at the usual places, your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or Powell's.

Chapter 1 (continued)

Zevaron took his breakfast before dawn with the other seamen. Someone had gone to shore and brought back fresh bread and fruit, small tart plums and dried figs.  The bread was coarse-grained, chewy with ground nuts.  Some kind of spice had been added, one Zevaron couldn’t identify.  Night had masked the strangeness of the place, but day could not keep it out.  Even the wooden sides smelled different here in port, and without the constant battering of waves, the ship seemed to be frozen in place.  The sailor who had warned him that he would be given a new name, a slave’s name, perhaps the name of a pet animal, cuffed him on the shoulder, not unkindly.

“No oars today, eh lad?”

From above came a shout.  The seamen swarmed up the ladder, Zevaron with them, and he got his first view of a Geloni city, a riot of brightness in the rising sun.  He had seen the wharves and jetties, with all the myriad craft, only as shadows.  Now shape and color assaulted him.  The sails were not only unbleached white but red and striped, the prows painted and adorned with carven images of women and or fish-tailed kings or strange beasts.  All around, boats were being loaded and unloaded.  Men bowed under their burdens, sacks and crates and barrels, their skins gleaming like polished metals, copper and iron and alabaster.  Carts rattled along the wooden jetties.  Zevaron had never seen onagers before; the desert tribes, including his own people, used ponies or camels.  The smells of brine and tar mingled with a thousand others.

For the next two hours, he had little attention to spare for the wonders of Verenzza.  Under the captain’s watchful eye, he hauled and carried and stacked, along with the grown seamen.  As usual, he made no complaint at weight or awkwardness.  Men in robes of pale yellow and red-trimmed white met with the captain and bargained, gesticulating toward the ship and the growing pile of cargo.  Zevaron supposed that they were arguing over whether they were about to receive the goods they had contracted for.  In the end, the city merchants departed, and the captain carried on board several small metal coffers.

Zevaron came on deck as he was bidden.  His mother stood there.  She wore her usual robes, stiff with dust and grime, but her hair was braided tight against her skull and then falling in a dozen wetly gleaming plaits. 

Early Opening Chapter to The Seven-Petaled Shield

For your reading pleasure, here is a very early opening chapter to The Seven-Petaled Shield. I've left it just as I wrote it, without attempting to bring spelling, name usage, place names, and the like, into congruence with the final, edited version. For myself, I find it fascinating to see how an author develops the characters and story. I hope this is interesting and rewarding to you, too.

This is the first of several sketches and out takes, which will be archived under "Read A Story" as I post them here.

You can buy the book at the usual places, your local bookstore, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, or Powell's.

Chapter 1

Late summer dusk hung like a pearly veil over the spires and towers of Verenzza. The glare of the day, hot and bright as the marble mined in the far reaches of the Gelon Empire, fell away. Even the water lapping the ancient piers hushed, as the borders between wave and wood, sky and earth melted.  The shoremen, teams of bronze-skinned, shaven-headed Xians, moved slowly through the slow spiral coiling of ropes, the dance of knots, the lifting of crate and barrel. Above them hung a moon just past half full, the lesser part still holding its secrets. Bright and dark alternately patterned the water.

The ship glided between the jetties, past barges and slavers, jooks and pleasure craft, its single sail limp, its oars barely touching the barred ripples.  Moon and twilight touched the craft, its sides like oyster silver, the spars and ropes to beaded pearl. No Verenzzan ship this, with strange symbols carved like amulets into the prow.  Every line of her breathed out a rare perfume, as if she had just drifted down from the glory fading in the western clouds.

The shoremen paused and watched, caught for a moment.  Then the light shifted, and the ship diminished, swallowed by the brine-laced shadows, one more sea-wracked craft limping into harbor, using the tidal current to spare its crew. 

In short time, the ship was moored and anchored, the fees paid to the Emperor’s harbormaster.  Tomorrow the shoremen would return to unload the cargo, but by now, ink stained the silver.  The moon paled against a milky banner of stars.

Soon the deck was empty except for the watch.  Within the oddly shaped cabin, light flickered, softly gold against the silver-black night.  A half-grown boy clambered up the rope ladder from below, moving slowly, pausing before the final reach and haul to gain the deck.  He wore ragged-hemmed drawstring pants several sizes too big for him, his hair a tousled fall of night.  The skin over his thin ribs was unmarked, velvet, as if the dust of the faroff lands still clung like a perfume.  He moved to the cabin door with an odd, liquid grace, a grace practiced and hidden from ordinary eyes.

A woman’s voice murmured within the cabin, clear as the sky after a storm, each syllable echoed in measured precision.  The boy tapped, listened, went in.  

The captain’s cabin, never spacious, had been divided with a patched curtain like a map of ports and lands, scraps of brocade and homespun, greasy suede and camel’s-hair cloth from far Azkhantia.

The woman sat on the single bed, built snug into the side of the cabin, narrow and spare, its mattress pressed like sandstone into the wooden frame.  An oil lamp hung beside her shoulders, and she held herself calm and straight.  The golden light burnished her skin to bronze, gleamed on the high cheekbones, the long knife-slim nose, the huge shadowed eyes.  She wore a loose hooded robe, desert-style, covering her from wrist to throat to toe tip.  On her lap, she held a book, tipping it to catch the light.  White salt crystals stiffened the leather covers.