Ysabeau S. Wilce's Blog

I'm probably going to shift most of my blogging over to tumblr, since it's easy to add pretty pictures. If you do tumblr, please follow me there. If you don't do tumblr, I will still post here sometimes, but tumblr & twitter are where my action is at these days.

Ah social media. What an entertaining time suck!From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

Did I mention I'm on tumblr?

You should go there; I post pretty pictures, and trenchant aphorisms, and sometimes videos of border collies doing parkour.

Plus, I am needy for followers. 

From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

Hardhands does not likechildren. This dislike is nothing personal; he doesn't like chicken either, orrainy days, or socks that were too tight. In fact, if asked to rank dislikes hewould have put these last three higher up on this list, easily. Maybe that was because chicken, rainy days and socks that were too tightintrude into his life. Children do not.  Still, his little experience with children,confined mostly to his dreadful niece—four years old and a red headed terror—haveleft him quite firm on the matter.

Hardhands does like dogs. He also likes sleeping late, double mochas andscrambled eggs, particularly the way that Paimon makes them, creamy and cheesy,and particularly on a late morning after a later night, after a particularlygood show. Last night's show had more than particularly good, it had beenfantastic, brilliant, fabulous, being superlative. The drums had rolled likethunder through the crowded club, crushing all before them, and his voice hadbalanced perfectly on the knife's edge of the guitar, cutting and quick. Theinvocation had been so superlatively heavy that the band had managed tomanifest Forneaus, who had produced the most killer bass solo ever heard at theOctagon Theatre. The show was so fabulous that half the audience had staggeredout into the early morning street with blood streaming from their ears, agog inbliss.
  
Now, still in afterglow, Hardhandshelps himself to more cheesy eggs out of the silver chafing dish. He is humming thebass line to Bury Me in ImmortalOblivion. If he had been asked what could ruin his perfectly good mood, hewould have said, in between egg and coffee, absfuckinglutely nothing.
 Thatwas before his grandmamma joins him at the table. From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

Hardhands does not like children. This dislike is nothing personal; he doesn't like chicken either, or rainy days, or socks that were too tight. In fact, if asked to rank dislikes he would have put these last three higher up on this list, easily. Maybe that was because chicken, rainy days and socks that were too tight intrude into his life. Children do not.  Still, his little experience with children, confined mostly to his dreadful niece—four years old and a red headed terror—have left him quite firm on the matter.

Hardhands does like dogs. He also likes sleeping late, double mochas and scrambled eggs, particularly the way that Paimon makes them, creamy and cheesy, and particularly on a late morning after a later night, after a particularly good show. Last night's show had more than particularly good, it had been fantastic, brilliant, fabulous, being superlative. The drums had rolled like thunder through the crowded club, crushing all before them, and his voice had balanced perfectly on the knife's edge of the guitar, cutting and quick. The invocation had been so superlatively heavy that the band had managed to manifest Forneaus, who had produced the most killer bass solo ever heard at the Octagon Theatre. The show was so fabulous that half the audience had staggered out into the early morning street with blood streaming from their ears, agog in bliss.
  
Now, still in afterglow, Hardhandshelps himself to more cheesy eggs out of the silver chafing dish. He is humming the bass line to Bury Me in Immortal Oblivion. If he had been asked what could ruin his perfectly good mood, he would have said, in between egg and coffee, absfuckinglutely nothing.
 That was before his grandmamma joins him at the table. From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

Your chance to get the Japanese editions of FLORA'S FURY is gone.

But you may well have another.


From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

Here's your chance to get the two volume set of the Japanese edition of FLORA'S Fury, and contribute to an extremely worthy cause--keeping the KGB reading series going for another few years.

Forty-five bucks is all it takes (same caliber as Flora's side-arm, dontchaknow), and since I'll be sending the books directly to you, I may be motivated to include goodies beyond my gorgeous signature. She who lives will see, as Nini Mo says. (Or He, as the case may be.)

I've already blogged about why it's important to support KGB even if you don't live anywhere near NYC and don't think you'll ever be able to attend a reading, so I won't repeat myself now.

But I will say that the Japanese edition of FLORA'S FURY is by far the most gorgeous edition of any Flora book ever, and well worth having for the art alone, even if your Japanese is slim to non-existent.



From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

Let's play what's in her dispatch case.

a black light scorpion flashlightwalleta packet of Snoopy brand tissuesappointment bookpen case full of pinscase with knife, fork & spoon (I hate plastic)iphone chargerbag of nutsbag of Gail Ambrosius cocoa covered dried cherriesLittle My coin purse 2 bars of Dandelion chocolate Power block battery chargerfive lipstickscollapsible bag 7 pens of various descriptions and huesthe menu from Delica, scribbled with reading suggestions from Sarah GranKindle Firenotebook black sparkly headbandgreen toy car missing its wheelsKindle fire chargerIkea pencilThermos bottle full of ice teaBinocularsSunglassesNini Mo would say: "Where's your knife?" That's a good question...where is my knife...I must have taken out when I flew last and not put it back in...

So what's in YOUR dispatch case?  From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

I have always written chronologically until now. With each of the Flora books I started at the beginning and then just plowed forward. If I got stuck, I was stuck, and there I stayed until I could figure out how to unstick (Get out of bed, Flora! It's not that bad!). This worked well enough, although sometimes it meant I sat around for weeks waiting for Flora to get out of bed. She likes to lay around and moan, that girl.

But for years, I've been accumulating bits of METAL MORE ATTRACTIVE; short stories, longer pieces that clearly fit in the narrative somewhere, but where oh where? And while I had an idea of what actually happened in the end, I didn't have any idea how the pieces fit together or why things happened, or what the over arcing story line was about other than Hardhands' burning desire to burn.


So when I finished FLORA'S DARE, I thought this is finally the time to figure out what the heck is going on with that boy and his little tiny doom. When I tallied up the fragments I had over 80K words. That's more than half a book! They were pretty good fragments too; I just had to figure out how they went together. And that's what I've been doing the last few months. Fleshing some out some stuff, cutting out other stuff, discovering back-story that I hadn't realized I'd inserted, and even, in a couple of cases, finding important scenes that I have no actual memory of ever writing. So I guess in a way, I'm following Joss's advice for the first time ever. And it's working out pretty well. I'm still at about 80K due to the splicing, pruning and adding, but now that 80K actually fits together in a (dis)orderly fashion and I feel as though I have some good sense of what's going on. Although I've been wrong about that before. (Never trust a trickster who you think isn't even in the book and then turns out to have been there all along pretending to be other characters.)


And there is something to be said, I realize now, about writing the really compelling urgent stuff first and then connecting it together later. Hardhands and Tiny Doom are rather urgent people (unlike Flora, who wants the answers quickly but don't have no energy) and so I often drop in on them and find them doing in the middle of doing some incredibly urgent thing they don't have time to explain. I just have to follow along behind, scribbling notes furiously, and then once the fuss has died down try to figure what *that* was all about. This is much more fun than sitting around waiting for Flora to get out of bed.


(I love ya, Flora, but more murder, less art!)

I have to say this is also making the writing process much more interesting and exciting. And when you have no idea what's going to happen next, and maybe next turns out to come before, well, the solving the puzzle makes the second draft much more fun.

As Nini Mo once said: if you spend all your time looking behind you, you'll never see what's in front of you.





From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

"I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, That’s absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it. Obviously, if you know you have a bunch of stuff to do, I have to lay out this, all this dull stuff, and I feel very uncreative but the clock is ticking. Then you do that and you choose to do that. But I always believe in just have as much fun as you can so that when you’re in the part that you hate there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, that you’re close to finished.”

Joss Whedon From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852

"Manna prepares a traditional Corsican dish, a boar fetus cooked in its mother, which Randle calls “The Criminal Meal.” In what he calls “The Quiet Hours,” each course is accompanied by headphones playing sounds of the sea, or rustling grass, or a waterfall, or a busy restaurant, or a factory floor, the intent being to match the dishes: scallops, salad, burned red pepper soup, shaved pork, macerated calf’s liver. The final course, the custard, is eaten in complete silence. He’s also experimented with dirt as food. He uses mud from fifty different states in fifty different dishes and calls the creation “The American Meal.”
From THE CALIFA POLICE GAZETTE...sailing to Byzantium since 852