hrj | Entries tagged with skin-singers

I'm still in the phase of "settling into a retirement rhythm" and working on good habits, but it's feeling more settled now. Less of the background radiation of anxiety now that the money stuff is in place. I even looked at my "special expenditures" projection and decided to get a hotel room for BayCon after all. (Commuting is cheaper than a room, but more exhausting, and it was going to make participating in the first online WSFS business meeting very complicated.) It's probably too late to try to pick up a roommate, though.

The "activity category tracking" spreadsheet is being useful, not only as a gamified incentive to Get Things Done, but as a reminder not to get too focused on any one topic. I'm up to 13 categories and generally do something in 5-9 of them on any given day. But it's ok to take days off when I'm down to 2 or 3, and it's fun (but not required) to hit all 13, which I've done twice. The most regular activities are exercise, working on the Lesbian Historic Motif Project (overlaps 3 categories: reading, writing, and promotion), reading for fun, housework, yardwork, and somewhat surprisingly, socializing (though having a calendar full of conferences and conventions has helped with that). The categories I've hit least are "do art" (which is primarily being checked off when I do embroidery during zoom meetings) and "do music" (which should be easier to check off since currently it's limited to "play through one etude on the flute and stop when my chin cramps up").

To the extent that I have a template for the day (for days when I have nothing else on the calendar), it ideally goes something like this:
* work on fiction over breakfast
* post the current LHMP blog and publicize it
* bike ride
* mid-ride, stop at a coffee shop and do some reading/note-taking for the LHMP
* on returning home, before showering, do yard work
* relax a bit with some fun reading (lunch optional)
* do some Medieval Welsh translation
* housework/household-organization
* write up the day's LHMP notes (alternately, work on the next podcast script)
* play music
* dinner & tv
* work on some sort of data organization project with tv in the background
If I hit all those, that only leaves "do art" and "socialize". Socializing is largely dependent on things outside the formal structure.

Mind you, I rarely actually do all of the above on a given day. But having a default template makes it more likely that I'll come close.

I'm making good progress on the current fiction project: the Skinsingers collection. I have one more specialized proofreading pass to do, then I need to decide whether I think it needs an outside proofreader as well. After that, I'll start working on learning the D2D system. I should search around to see if someone has come up with some handy templates for "this is the standard front/back matter for different types of books." Mostly I'm looking at books I have on my shelves. But then there are e-book specific questions like "in a print book, the publication history of the stories in the collection generally come next to the copyright page, but in an e-book the practice seems to be to put most extraneous matter at the end." Can I format the two differently? Do I want to, or do I want consistency?

The plan is to launch at Worldcon, but have it ready enough in advance to get some pre-publicity out. Though I'm not planning a significant publicity campaign for this "test book," just a chance to limber up the muscles.

Back twenty years ago, I made my first professional fiction sale: a story titled "Skins" to Sword and Sorceress XII (1995). It wasn't anything particularly special or daring--shapeshifters (at a time before shapeshifters had become an urban fantasy cliche) in a vaguely medievaloid secondary world, where transformation was achieved with songs and cloaks made of animal skins. That story had its inspirations in the intersection of a poem I'd written about transforming into an owl and an odd little dream involving the opening scenario's frantic chase.

One of the emergent quirks of the Sword and Sorceress anthology series was a tendency for authors to run continuing characters and series over multiple volumes. So the next year I ventured to submit another story in the same world, continuing the adventures of the characters in the first one. This was "More Than One Way" (Sword and Sorceress XIII, 1996), which introduced several of what would become recurring themes--the making of bargains and the refusal to accept the restricted choices that fate seemed to be offering--as well as introducing Ashóli, the character who would thereafter become the focus of the series. The following year I added "By the Skin of Her Teeth" (Sword and Sorceress XIV, 1997) and the next, "Skin-Deep" (Sword and Sorceress XV, 1998), following the adventures of Ashóli and her friend-then-lover Eysla, who had not been born to the shape-shifting people but proved that the skill could be given to anyone.

And then I stopped writing for a while. Or rather, and then writing my PhD dissertation consumed my brain entirely for the next half-decade. I knew Ashóli's story was far from finished, but I didn't return to that world until I'd finished my degree, when MZB (the original series editor) had died and the new editor Diana L. Paxson included me in the invitations to submit to the continuing series. That next story, "The Skin Trade" (Sword and Sorceress XXI, 2004) brought my characters to the city of Wilentelu and the service of its governor, which provided the inspiration for a possible grand finale for the series. I knew it would involve travel to foreign lands and the negotiation for a bride for the Marchalt of Wilentelu, but at that time I knew little more than that. In the mean time, I explored more of the integration of my skin-changer people back into human society in "Skin and Bones" (Sword and Sorceress XXII, 2007), the darkest of the stories so far.

At that point, DAW had dropped the series. (I assume that once MZB was no longer available to lend cachet, the series no longer had the knee-jerk sales figures that her name could command. Or maybe they had always supported it just to humor her? I don't know.) It had been picked up by Norilana Books, a very small press with essentially no distribution, and it no longer seemed like a good venue to focus my efforts. In addition to which, I was realizing that the concluding story that was taking shape in my mind was going to be significantly longer than the short story length the anthology accepted.

That final story "Hidebound" has, in fact, come in at 17,100 words. Right at the top end of the novelette length, and in spitting distance of becoming a novella (at 17,500). It turns out to be an awkward length to find markets for. Even markets that take novelettes often have a much shorter cut-off, and markets that take novellas tend to be looking for something significantly longer. But I've identified a first choice, and a couple of back-up choices. "Hidebound" is finished, beta-read, and revised, and I'll be sending it out on submission tonight.

But that's not the end of the story. Although "Hidebound" is carefully designed to be a stand-alone, I've long had in mind to gather up the entire series into a single volume. (Working title: Skin-Singer.) The older volumes in the series are almost impossible to find (though I pick up used copies when I spot them, to pass on to interested parties) and by the time I got to "Skin and Bones", reviewers were starting to comment that they felt they were missing something by not having the whole set of stories. Now, I don't have the name recognition for anyone to be interested in taking a chance on a collection like that, and current market conditions mean that an e-book only format would probably be the most viable option. That means that I'm looking at making my first serious venture into self-publishing. (I've done non-fiction desktop publishing before, and I've been learning the e-book formatting process with some short stories, but a whole book to be sold online is a different matter.)

It won't happen for a while. I definitely want to get "Hidebound" into some existing publication venue, not only to raise potential interest for the eventual collection, but because getting short fiction into existing markets is one of my best ways to grow some name recognition among SFF readers. In the mean time, I have some decisions to make and work to do.

I want to do significant revisions to the previous stories before putting the collection together. There are some continuity and world-building issues I'd like to smooth out. And--not to put too fine a point on it--I'd like to think that I'm a much better writer now than I was twenty years ago, and I'd like the series as a whole to be a bit more consistent in quality. Beyond that I'll have to think about things like commissioning cover art and whether I want to include any extras outside of the stories themselves. (I have a lot of material on the kaltaoven language that conlang geeks might be interested in.) There's also the question of what sort of project model I want to use.

A lot of self-published projects of this type are being done with Kickstarter-type fundraising, complete with bonus levels and donor extras. I'm going to be bluntly honest here and say that, thanks to my day job, I have no need to do any outside fundraising to put Skin-Singer out, even with commissioning a cover artist and pulling in an outside editor and whatnot. But Kickstarter campaigns aren't only about money; they're also a powerful way of generating advance buzz about a project so that, when it appears, not only do you have an existing set of people who have pre-subscribed to the book, but you have a further set of people who are aware of its existence.

That might be a good enough reason alone to use a Kickstarter model. There are several down sides. If I went the Kickstarter route and got little to no response, it would be a major emotional blow. The sort of blow I've been trying to avoid setting myself up for. And if I did it, it failed, and then I went ahead and produced the book anyway, that sort of rubs in the point that it was all just for show and publicity in the first place. So I don't know. I need to think about this longer and solicit some trustworthy opinions.

The question of distribution is less fraught. There are several options that don't involve dealing with selling e-books through my own website. I've explored some of them in general terms already.

So what do you think? Would you be interested in a collected Skin-Singer volume? What would you like to get from it other than having all the stories available and in one place? Do you think I should leave all the original stories as is or do you agree that I should revise them all? Who would you pick as a cover artist if you could pick anyone at all?

The initial very rough dictation transcripts for Hidebound came out to about 15K words, but due to the nature of the medium, there was a fair amount of redundancy in coverage. Talk is cheap, as they say, and if I can't remember if I've covered a scene already, better to do it again than forget it. At this point I've converted that to about 2500 more polished words without substantially affecting the overall word count. If this conversion rate continues to hold, we're looking at a longish novelette, or if the final version expands a smidge more, just barely over the line to novella. It'll probably be close enough that at some point I'll start looking at how the difference would affect where I can send it. (Professional advice on the (dis)advantages of both categories will be cheerfully entertained.)

Back in 1995 when the first of my skin-singer stories was published, the whole "shapeshifter erotica" thing hadn't really come into being yet. If one can trace some of the key drivers of the motif, that same year was when the third Anita Blake novel came out (the first one with a major shapeshifter character and well before the series…well, shifted in certain directions). It would be another decade before the Twilight phenomenon cemented the popularity of vampire/werewolf erotica as a genre of its own. Today, sheer statistics would suggest that people are firmly of the opinion that shapeshifter equals erotica, no questions, no exceptions. (And when doing some cursory background research for this paragraph, it came to my attention that "gay cuttlefish shapeshifter erotica" is a thing. I. Can't. Even.)

So clearly I am once again going to be wildly out of step with the zeitgeist. The skin-singer stories are not erotic. There is an ongoing (same-sex) relationship running through the stories, but they can't really be called romance by any stretch of the imagination. Just plain old-fashioned secondary-world fantasy with a quasi-medieval Europeanoid setting, and a shape-changing process that owes more to shamanistic motifs than contagion or genetics.

So: no urban fantasy, no erotic romance, no angst over dominance/submission posturing. What we have instead is a story of cultural change and adaptation, the fine line between mutual interest and exploitation, and making bets about which path to cast your fate to. Hidebound will, above all, be a story about women's bonds and conflicts in a patriarchal context. About devising and negotiating bargains that enable all parties to win. About forging a path to your heart's desire, no matter what the barriers and the cost. All of the skin-singer stories have -- without really intending it -- turned out to be about making choices, and about demanding different options when the choices you're offered are unacceptable. I think it's going to be a really good story. I sure hope some editor thinks so as well.

I have made a spreadsheet (of course I've made a spreadsheet) and collated all the feedback commentary on The Mystic Marriage from my beta-readers in response to my detailed topic/character prompt list. (Except for the couple who haven't gotten back to me yet who are in danger of being dropped from future beta-reader lists -- *hint* *hint*.) I have also made a spreadsheet with chapter-by-chapter notes, theirs and mine. Next is to review the topic/character feedback, determine which items need revision versus which are a matter of variable taste, and translate them into chapter-specific revision notes.

That's the complex part. I need a sprinkling of additional references to minor character X involving groundwork for future plot point Y -- when can this occur? I need more explicit build-up of the main couple's attraction to each other (before they know it themselves) -- where can that occur? I need to show the positive aspects of what's driving character A, not just the negative ones -- where can this be fit in?

I've also been thinking over what I want to do about revision to the existing Skin-Singer stories for the collection. Originally I was thinking of just some light cleaning-up and continuity, but with them all in one place (even though I have no plans to try to turn them into a single overall story) it makes sense to add in a little more deep background about the world (to the extent that I know it) to provide more of a sense of place. Things that I didn't know back when I started writing them. Also -- to be blunt -- I'm a better writer now, and it makes sense to try to bring the collection up to my current standard. This makes it a bigger project than it would have been, but it's going to be a bit bigger than I originally thought anyway if I'm going to end up self-publishing it. (With Bella not interested and no functional connection to either of the outfits that put out the Sword and Sorceress series, I really can't see finding a print publisher who would take it.) This means I not only have to worry about issues like formatting, but I need to deal with cover design and so forth. Nothing I want to do sloppily or in a hurry.

And then there are some bits and snippets of Book 3 that I've ben jotting down (in addition to having started on the detailed outline -- much more detailed than any of the previous books). Yes, there is actual text in the file labeled Mother of Souls. Now if only I could think of an name for my second main character!