Currently pausing forward progress on my novel rough draft by going back and readjusting/revising generic mountainous forest setting description to…this.
Aka I did my research wrong in the beginning and I need to go back and adjust several chapters to be more awesome.
(Current wordcount: 245k)
Back in 2011 when I started this blog, I named it “Gods, Witches, Space & Stars” as an encapsulating summary of the type of stories I was working on at the time: switching back and forth between what I called my “Gods & Witches” secondary fantasy world and some science fiction.
I first created my “Gods & Witches” world in 2009 for Brandon Sanderson’s SF&F writing class. As part of that class, we were to begin a whole new writing project rather than continue working on any pet projects. So, I began a Rapunzel-inspired story set in a secondary world of–you guessed it–gods and witches, where “gods” had creation magic and “witches” had destruction magic. The repercussions for using their magic were inspiring awe, reverence, and a compulsion to worship or follow (gods) or inspiring intense fear and hatred in anyone in the vicinity to the point of their wanting to kill you (witches). There’s a bit more to it than that, but my idea was to take folkloric trends and human tendencies and press down on them, exaggerate them, or make them a bit more concrete and a bit less abstract.
I ended up writing something like 76k of the first book of my planned duology (The Witch’s Tower (Rapunzel retelling) / God’s Arrows (Cupid & Psyche retelling)) before running into several problems I was unequipped to solve at the time.
One, The Witch’s Tower was far bleaker and more tragic a story than I actually wanted to write. And although I retooled the ending and overall arc several times to make it lighter or more hopeful, I kept running into the fact that although I mentally wanted to write something more uplifting, I emotionally couldn’t. Frankly, I was carrying too much emotional baggage from my own life that I needed to confront, work through, and heal in order to be able to write anything else. Writers write from our hearts and our subconscious as well as our minds, after all.
Two, even though I’d been writing collaboratively with friends for over a decade by this point, I had comparatively little experience crafting plots solo. The 76k I’d written barely scratched the surface of the story I wanted to tell, and I was frustrated by its lack of substance. I wasn’t sure at the time if this was due to my intense love of long-story formats or if I simply didn’t know what I was doing. I suspected it was more the latter, (although frankly it’s probably both).
It was really hard for me to reach the decision to set the world and these stories aside, however I don’t regret it. I spent the next several years experimenting with and learning from short fiction, from 1k one-offs to my 44k novella. I won’t say that I’m a master of plotting now, but I’m increasing my ability to tell if my pace is a plot problem that needs solving or if I simply need to go ahead and indulge my love of wandering through character and worlds.
Then in 2014, my friends at World Weaver Press did a #SFFLunch Twitter chat on my birthday and I jokingly suggested they create a dragon anthology for me. Aaaand they agreed! Haha, I’m still highly entertained and pleased by this.
After looking at the worlds and stories I had to hand to see where I might craft a dragon story to submit, I eyed my Gods & Witches world and characters and realized that allowing the mentor-figure of The Witch’s Tower to encounter a dragon in her backstory would set her on a much less lonely, wearying, tragic path. It would also unravel a good deal of the resulting situation and plot I’d written out in that 76k, and sort of create a “what if something else had happened” alternate direction.
In other words, if I wrote a dragon-and-girl friendship romance story with this character in this world, I could not only practice my plotting, but I’d create much more light and hope and a greater potential for happiness within my own inner worlds. It felt like a much more suitable way to say goodbye.
I took up the challenge; I wrote the story. I saved it a couple years to submit to the anthology, but unfortunately due to a few things the anthology never got off the ground.
However, I’ve also sought help and feedback on the story sporadically over the years, and I’ve learned a lot from my experiences revising. From cutting a scene on one reader’s feedback, to putting it back in with a different approach on the very next reader’s feedback, revising this story has given me a lot to think about concerning what’s right or wrong in regards to storytelling and the relationship between a writer’s intent and readers’ expectations. Especially since, in my quest to write a lighter story (despite the protagonist’s difficult past), I originally undercut the protagonist’s emotional arc and made her a bit colorless and the ending weak or difficult to understand. I’ve definitely grappled a lot with the balance of dark and light in this story. We will see what impact my revisions have made.
Now it’s time to share it with the world and move on to the next big adventure: another world, another novel that’s now well over 100k and pleasing me much more.
I should probably change the name of my blog to something more suitable to what I’m writing currently, but first, my announcement!
I’m giving away this story, “The Dragon’s Gift, Once Given” for free to start off my new fiction-writing and releases newsletter. The story clocks in at roughly 12k, right between short and long, haha. I’m still happy with how I wrote their relationship. A dragon with a sense of humor? Check!
Enjoy! 🙂
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Click to sign up for my fiction newsletter and receive a copy of “The Dragon’s Gift.” (Link deleted. Now no longer on offer as a freebie. Thanks to all those who were interested!)
So, let’s say you’ve given your manuscript to all your alpha-readers already. They pointed out trouble-areas and you fixed those then gave your manuscript to your beta-readers. They pointed out more major structural changes and you put your nose to the grindstone and made more changes. Unfortunately, now you’ve run through all your regular readers and you want a fresh set of eyes.
Or let’s say that for one reason or another, you don’t think your regular alpha/beta-readers will appreciate your new manuscript. It’s not to their preferred taste and you’re looking for someone outside your normal sphere of feedback for this one-off project.
Or maybe you’ve just had no luck at all getting feedback and need a reader who will take your work seriously, who will actually get back to you when they say they will, or who will speak bluntly about their reading experience.
In all of these cases and more, I offer my services as a beta-reader. This is not to be confused with the job of an editor or copy-editor. I will be reading your work using these principles. Preferably, I will not be the first set of eyes to look at your manuscript, but if that’s what you need, then I am willing to be an alpha-reader, as well.
Normally, yes, you don’t pay your alpha/beta-readers but swap services with them instead. “I’ll read your manuscript if you read mine,” and so on. However, good feedback is sometimes hard to find, especially a fresh set of eyes when you’re in a pinch. I’ve had to do a lot of scaling back on alpha/beta-reading these past several years. I don’t like saying no, but my time and energy are limited. So this is the solution I’ve hit on, to fill a specific need. Finances are also rocky at the moment, I still have health challenges, I need some additional income, et voilà. Necessity is the mother of invention. 🙂
Portfolio.
Services.
Payment.
Instructions:
Update: Now taking clients for projects read in January 2017 and later.
Keywords: find an alpha-reader, find a beta-reader, beta-reading services, critique partner, reader, manuscript reading services, sensitivity reader
Well, this post is going to be a bit different, since I’ll essentially be presenting and reviewing two out-of-print French books, but stick with me.
Two Christmases ago I received several collections of Alsatian/Lorraine and Breton/Gallo folklore to feed my obsession. Among them were Alsatian-centric Dragons, fantômes, et trésors cachés : légendes, traditions et contes d’Alsace, with text by Guy Trendel and illustrations by Thierry Christmann (1988) and Contes populaires et légendes d’Alsace. Translating to: Dragons, ghosts, and hidden treasures: legends, traditions, and folktales of Alsace, and Folktales and legends of Alsace.
I’d gone into the request for more books of folklore hoping that, since folktales belong to the people, that the folklorists would be presenting their tales as-told-by the people, maybe with some light editing for readability. I know of collections that are essentially dictations of oral recordings, with names and ages stated of the individuals telling the tales. Adolphe Orain, for example, is a 19th century Breton-Gallo folklorist who did just that.
However, while researching a few of the tales in Contes populaires, I looked into the resources quoted in the bibliography, tracked down and compared the present telling to the original recording and discovered that it had been significantly pared down and adapted. I was then presented with the conundrum–does the folktale still count as belonging to the people in the past, does it still count as being “public domain” and open to translation, if the tale has been adapted and altered so much? If the folklorist has added so much of their own touch? What is the nature of folklore, as it’s being passed down?
If you’ve been following my folktale and fairy tale translations on little translator, you know I’ve been sticking to–or trying my best to stick to–tales that are freely available. But I didn’t realize when I started how many grey areas there would be to try and avoid.
Last year I translated the tale “Le chasseur vert” or “The Green Hunter” from the collection Contes populaires and offered it to my Patreon supporters while I was in the midst of trying to figure all this out. Since I’ve come to the conclusion that it would be better to stick to only translating folklore from their original publications in the 19th century and earlier and, unfortunately, avoid any modern folklore collections, I’m going to make a change.
There is something I can do with these more modern-day folktale collections, however, and that is to show you how awesome they are, present you with their bibliographies in case any of you encountering this post also wish to read original French folklore or do similar research as me, aaaaand give you a token translation as part of this review. I won’t make a habit of it, but I do still want to do all this cultural heritage justice. It’s really hard to do research across borders, and I want to make it easier.
So, without further ado, “The Green Hunter” from page 182.
“The Green Hunter”
The Green Hunter hunts men.
A poor woman from Saint-Amarin valley went on pilgrimage to Thierenbach. Once arrived at the foot of the Freundstein castle ruins, she considered for a moment the vulture nests perched atop the rocks and, at the thought of every lord past, present, and future, she began to murmur inwardly against God who would not give her even enough to buy a new pair of shoes.
All at once, she saw a small pile of écu blanc coins shining at her feet. As she bent to collect the treasure she cast a furtive glance around her; consequently, she perceived at some distance away a hunter clothed in green who was watching her beneath furrowed brows. Seized with fright, she left the coins behind and continued on her way through the forest, quickening her pace and regretting the loss of such a great fortune. On the other side of the castle ruins, she met a man walking alone, though he had a certain air of charm and grace and a smile on his lips. This affable gentleman condescended to address her and inquired after the reason for her sadness, sympathized with her, approved her complaints, took part in her grousing, and even encouraged her: together they broke the valley’s silence with their ranting.
Suddenly, the stranger’s eyes gleamed darkly. A terrible smile split open his mouth, revealing pointed teeth. It was the Green Hunter.
He took a cord from his pocket, strangled the old woman, and hung her from a branch.
One of the great things about taking a survey of folklore collections’ table of contents is that you can start to see a pattern.
For example, there are many familiar themes: Catholic saints and miracles are as important as tales of ghosts in the cities and faeries in the woods. “Une nuit dans les bois” features a man who gets lost in the woods and what he discovers. “La chasse maudite” is yet another tale of a sort of Wild Hunt. “Le guerrier dormant” is about a mysterious sleeping warrior–a historical figure who might awake when needed to save them?
But there are also repeating, specific tales: “Le pont des fées” or “The Faeries’ Bridge” has been told in so many different versions for this region that I included it in my growing collection of translations. “La légende de l’horloge” or “The Legend of the Clock” also is a local favorite. Likewise, “The Silver Rose” which features in “Petit légendaire alsacien,” and “The Legend of Hans-Trapp,” a sort of bogeyman to scare children into being good. Not to mention, a whole slew of legends about the Strasbourg cathedral.
The repeating themes and tales are what I look for when trying to find something representative to translate.
Another use for surveying tables of content is you can see a pattern of everyone’s favorite go-to folklorists for the region, which you can then use in your own research. Names such as Auguste Stoeber (who wrote in German), Prosper Baur, and Abbé Charles Braun figure repeatedly.
As for the book’s collection itself, I think it’s really well curated. Especially in the “Petit légendaire alsacien” chapter which has a whole slew of bite-sized tales that paint a fantastic magical realism picture, from the countryside to the city streets. I think it has something for everyone and something for everywhere.
So, here is the table of contents and the bibliography. Go ahead and skip over them if you don’t speak French or German. 😉
Table of Contents.
Bibliography
The second book I’m discussing today has pictures! Some in color, some in ink. I really like it because the folklorist not only tells the tale, provides illustrations, but as you can see on the right next to the key icon, there’s even commentary on the tale’s themes, cultural trends, etc.
“The Haunted Coach of Rosheim”:
This is one of the folktales that inspired my retelling short story “What She Saw by Lantern Light.” In the original tale, it’s a young, newly-married woman who makes the overnight trek from Rosheim to Strasbourg to be there for the early morning market and encounters the flying diligence coach, as you can see in the illustration.
In my retelling “What She Saw by Lantern Light,” I changed the protagonist to be a younger girl trying to support her family and I also added a few other inspirations into the mix to make it my own, which I’ve discussed previously.
The retelling appeared in Kate Wolford’s Frozen Fairy Tales, and I suppose it’s been out long enough I can spoil it, haha.
“What She Saw by Lantern Light”is available at various retailers.
In any case, I mentioned earlier that I look for repeating themes when I translate. Location is another. Certain locations in Alsace tend to collect stories. One of these is Nideck–the Nideck castle, Nideck waterfall. There are many tales of the giants who lived at Nideck, and about the nymph who lives at the falls. Wangenbourg castle, which isn’t far from Nideck, is another with several tales to its name. Hohenstein castle is another.
To demonstrate, I translated “La dame blanche du Hohenstein” from this collection. Not only does it take place at a folktale hot-spot, but it also features a White Lady, a common creature in French folklore. In the tales I’ve encountered, she often bears a key, and…well, you’ll see. This is from page 35.
“The White Lady of Hohenstein”
Numerous people out walking at the approach of evening have seen a lady, dressed all in white, haunting the Hohenstein castle ruins. She sits at the top of a boulder, so close to the sheer drop that she seems to want to cast herself from its height. She extends her hands beseechingly to every passerby and utters little moans and cries of despair.One day, a very long time ago, a reckless–albeit dependable–man who lived in the area was passing nearby when he saw the white lady. Believing it was only a tourist who had lost her way and could not manage to climb down from her difficult position, he scaled the rock to help her. He was just about to take hold of her when the lady handed him a key, begging him to find in the ruins of the old fortress a strongbox:
“You will see a monster crouched atop the coffer, but do not be afraid; it will flee as soon as you insert the key into the lock. You will open the coffer and find a treasure. Take as many gold pieces as you can carry, for they will be yours; but above all, do not forget to return to me the key I have just given you.”
Somewhat surprised, our exuberant fellow set out on his search for the coffer which he did indeed discover. On the lid sat a horrible monster, just as she had said. But, courageous, the traveler inserted the key and the beast vanished into thin air as soon as the lid opened, revealing marvels, gold, and precious stones within. Eager, he stuffed as much as he could into his pockets, even clutching so much in his hands that he could no longer retrieve the key for fear of dropping a single coin. Carrying his treasure, he returned to the white lady who, at his approach, uttered a cry of despair. The key, her salvation, was missing! In an instant the riches taken from the coffer transformed into a fistful of dust that the wind swept from his hands. Desire had once again triumphed over vows.
And so, the white lady still awaits a being of exceptional quality who will not forget their promise or sell it for a little gold!
I really enjoyed this collection. There are shape-shifting rabbits, men with wolfish eyes and wolves with human eyes, scarab beetles that might be gold, a wicked black stallion who keeps a lady captive, a man on fire, a pet dragon, cow-ammunition à la Monty Python, and last but not least, two white cat mages:
Hold onto these two. You might see them again later 😉
Table of Contents. (Note, not all accents included, for speed of my typing).
Bibliography.
Just skimming through that, even for the non-initiate it should be farely obvious that this region–situated right on the border of France and Germany and contested between the two throughout all of time–has resources in both French and German. It would be really cool to pair up with a German literary translator sometime and do a collection of folklore and fairy tales from this region.
Maybe someday….
I’m going to be collecting a few things I’ve done elsewhere, here, to make up for the lack of interesting things lately on the blog while I work on writing and translating. The first is a poem-response sent to a folklore aficionado acquaintance. Check out his tumblr for lots of cool faerie-lore.
So, I’ve wanted a cover for my novella ever since I started putting it up to read on Wattpad last September, but finances are super tight and I wasn’t sure that would be possible. Ideally, I wanted an illustration for my cover rather than stock art, but illustrated covers are by far the most expensive and my max budget for a cover at this point is $100. So when I saw that Natasha Alterici had posted on Twitter that her freelance gigs had fallen through and she needed quick cash for her rent, I leaped at the chance to make one of my dreams come true. And boy, am I ever glad I did. Behold the awesome:
I have also been intrigued by Amanda C. Davis’ recent forays into designing covers for DIY practice. She’s been tackling all kinds of covers, and I previously let her know that I was interested in her giving my novella a shot. Am so glad I did that, too, because my laptop has been giving me all kinds of troubles, and there’d be no way I could do the cover design myself right now. As soon as Natasha got back to me on the final cover, I sent it Amanda’s way. Amanda posted her design/learning process here.
And here it is in all its gorgeousness:
Art by Natasha Alterici.
Design by Amanda C. Davis.
I just finished “updating” my translation website to reflect the current state of affairs. Knowing me, I will probably only get a full website working when I have something to show for it, aka when Persinette is ready to sell. But never fear, I am making good progress there. I’m on task to finish my second translation pass by the end of the month, which makes me very happy.
The “little translator” image was made for me by Myriam Bloom. The cover art for Andromeda was designed by Niki Smith.
…on the way to the forum?
So, I keep a wishlist of about 200 books on it. The great thing about keeping books on the Amazon wishlist is that it marks when books go down in price and how much. It feels rather like playing the stock market. I watch for books to go swooping/gliding down in price before I snatch them up.
Well, yesterday, I noticed two books in particular.
The Ocean at the End of the Lane by Neil Gaiman dropped from $12.99 to $8
and Theft of Swords by Michael J. Sullivan has been at $7.99 but it’s on promotion to $2.99 until the end of the month.
So, feeling helpful, I tweeted about them, using my Amazon Associates link so I could get a small commission in case anyone else decided to pick them up along with me.
Then Neil Gaiman retweeted my tweet to all his then 1,887,922 followers. (Yes, that is almost 2 million.)
Then it got retweeted another 30 times.
I said “Holy smokes” a lot. (I wasn’t aware this was in my vocabulary.)
So this morning I anxiously checked my account to see how much I made? I had to laugh.
Out of those people, 750 clicked the link to check out the page.
Out of those, 12 people made purchases.
So I made $6.
Yes, I find this hilarious.
So, for the price of one tweet, I got an almost-free book?
I thought I’d just link you all to two videos, they’re both really short and interesting!
And here are 5 interesting factoids learned elsewhere about living in space:
So, I think I’m going to start using this blog to show off cool research. A big part of writing fiction is doing research and learning about things, it’s not just about making stuff up. (Yeah, even though I’m not in school, I still do a lot of research, I just don’t write nonfiction papers anymore, it all goes into fiction.) We learn about people, about events, about how things work. Then all of our research becomes story fodder.
Often times, seasoned professionals get upset with writers who misrepresent them and their work. And it’s true that sometimes we don’t know what we’re writing wrong because we’re just writing what someone before us has written. It can be anything–getting science wrong or history wrong, or someone’s culture wrong. We take a lot for granted.
I would love to invite guest posts on these and any subjects. Have you done research and learned something new lately? What was it and what are 5 things you found new, interesting, or surprising?
– – –
I have a character who used to be a private detective, so I went looking to see what there was to learn about being a private detective, and I found this distance-learning school at Detective Training Institute. They teach you all the book-work learning in 3-6 months in preparation for being an apprentice PI at an agency. Really cool! They also offer their first lesson free, so I read that. Here are five new things I learned from their introductory lesson:
I learned a lot more than this, but 5 seems like a good number. Expect to see more posts like this one!
Dragons, Faeries, Space & Stars 