Week of March 12-18

[mrissa]

One acceptance, one rejection. Could be worse. Has been worse, in fact; often.

Some books I write with Midnight Sun Brain and some with Long Night Brain. I can feel the difference. I don't expect it to be sensible externally, although people who know me might be able to guess which books were which from here. No points for guessing that Thermionic Night is a Long Night Brain book. Equally no points for guessing that Midnight Sun Rising will be a Midnight Sun Brain book. But once the latter is written and my lovely first-readers have read both, they might be able to guess the rest from there.

I am beginning to think that second books in series are always Long Night Brain, regardless of whether the first books in those series are Midnight Sun Brain or Long Night Brain books. I think it's part of second-book nature. So far I've written the second book in a four-book series and the second book in a trilogy, and I'm currently writing the second of what will probably be five. And they're all Long Night Brain books. Thinking of other people's famous second-in-series stories, The Two Towers looks from the outside like a Long Night Brain book (so does the rest of LotR), and "The Empire Strikes Back" is definitely a Long Night Brain movie, but Prince Caspian was a Midnight Sun Brain book, so probably this is just me, if that.

If I have no particular reason not to, I should probably write a Midnight Sun Brain book next just to keep the brain from going too very lopsided.

It's all about where the light goes, really.

Ummm. Anyone else have professional bits of externally incomprehensible fruitbattery they'd like to share?

Comments

[mechaieh.livejournal.com]

professional bits of externally incomprehensible fruitbattery

To share, no. But I just wanted to observe that that is a fabulous phrase and it is making me smile.

Fruitbattery

[zalena.livejournal.com]

I'm teaching dialogue in my teen creative writing class tomorrow. I am including something you complained about in one of your posts: overuse of adverbs (specifically in dialogue tags.) This is not something I have ever seen written about any any of the professional manuals, even though everyone has some snarky schoolmarm comment they harp on. (Ex. "Words are not clapped, laughed, smiled, or flung. They are spoken.")

I've been cracking myself up all afternoon by my example sentences, all of which involve someone named Gavin and someone named Sheila meeting in a graveyard.

I can't say these classes are the most fun I've ever had with words, but it is interesting to pull things apart and try to tell others HOW the trick is done.

Re: Fruitbattery

[callunav.livejournal.com]

I think I've had words flung at me on one or two occasions of my life. Overall, though, no argument.

If you haven't read Shirley Jackson's "Notes for a Young Writer" (1962), you might enjoy it. It's the last piece in the anthology which begins with and is titled for the unfinished novel, Come Along With Me. I don't agree with everything she says, but it's worth reading. I was thinking of it because you reminded me of the paragraph that begins,

"Use all your seasonings sparingly. Do not worry about making your characters shout, intone, exclaim, remark, shriek, reason, holler, or any such thing, unless they are doing it for a reason. All remarks can be said. Every time you use a fancy word, your reader is going to turn his head to look at it going by and sometimes he may not turn his head back again."

And, also, I must complain: now *I* want to read about Gavin and Sheila meeting in a graveyard.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Do you write Summer fiction and Winter fiction in their proper seasons always, or do they just feel that season regardless of when you write them?

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

So many people have the summer-active idea going, and I understand in theory, but in practice it's if anything the opposite of what I experience. For me, summer is time to laze on the porch with a tall lemonade, or to eat an ice cream cone while moving as little as possible. Winter cold wakes me up! Good morning, scurry off to get the snow shoveled and the cookies baked!

[callunav.livejournal.com]

"but Prince Caspian was a Midnight Sun Brain book, so probably this is just me, if that."

Okay, but what about The Magician's Nephew? Because according to at least one source I've just looked at, scholars apparently agree that there was an abandoned draft of Magician's Nephew in between the writing of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the writing of Prince Caspian.

It's odd, attempting to get a sense of what your two brains look like--

Okay, that was just a bad sentence.

I mean that reading your assessment of things as "Long Night Brain" or "Midnight Sun Brain" stories has me, without really intending to, attempting to intuit the pattern and apply it. So from the things I'm familiar with which you have described, I find myself thinking that Magician's Nephew /would/ seem like a more "Long Night Brain" kind of story than Prince Caspian, and then realizing that I don't in any way possess the information base from which to draw that kind of conclusion.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

See, but even if The Magician's Nephew was complete between LWW and Prince Caspian, it would still be the prequel, not the second book. (And certainly, no matter what modern marketers are saying, not the first.)

The bits with the Wood Between the Worlds and the garden and the creation all make me think it's a Midnight Sun Brain book, but that's just from the outside, and also I haven't reread it for awhile and could easily be wrong.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I have a braincase full of fruitbattery--also man-eating accordions and raining pianos.

There are fun projects, white fire projects, them projects, experiment projects, and any of these can turn into squids, turtles, snakes, or sunbursts.