Here to Create

From the moment the main character wakes up on a slab in the morgue, Three Days to Dead by Kelly Meding had me hooked.

Evy Stone, a hunter of Dregs (nonhuman species like goblins, vampires, and weres), has been resurrected into a new body and has three days to figure out who killed her and why. She has no hope of living past the time limit, but she’s still intent on saving her city from the potentially horrific results of a planned alliance between the goblins and vampires. Not only that, she wants to figure out who killed the other two members of her Triad and framed her for their murders. With the help of the only person she can trust, her Triad’s former handler, Wyatt, she follows a trail of lies and deception to the truth, which is worse than anyone thought.

It’s a strange thing to play detective in your own life, but Evy’s reactions to her discoveries were well-balanced emotionally. Part of her is intent on solving the mystery, reacting to challenges as decisively as any kick-ass urban fantasy heroine, while another part is sometimes overcome by the betrayals and painful memories she discovers. These occasional reminders of Evy’s human vulnerabilities only increased my admiration for her courage and made me want to find out who had killed her and why. Helping the reader connect to Evy’s previous life are the vivid portrayals of human and Dreg minor characters, both allies and enemies. While the sheer variety of Dreg species were sometimes hard to keep track of, I appreciated the blending of traditional and fresh depictions of these fantasy staples.

With only three days to live, the story moves fast from the moment Evy wakes, the short time she has left emphasized by the countdown at the beginning of each chapter. So at first the romance subplot threw me off, as it seemed like too much of a distraction considering everything else Evy had to do in those three days. But the characters and their interactions were so real that I believed in their relationship with the help of some flashbacks that gave me a good sense of their prior friendship.

One of my favorite parts of this book was watching how Evy adapts to her new body. At first she flounders a bit with physical skills she’d been proficient with in her old life, and later she discovers her new body has some different feelings and abilities, which also take some getting used to. I liked this touch of realism and the accompanying entanglements of the life of the woman who had previously owned Evy’s body.

Three Days to Dead is very tightly plotted, with all the clues, whether they prove true or false, clicking together in a puzzle picture that grows clearer as the story progresses. Reading with my skeptical writer brain, I expected to find a few threads left unresolved, but everything wrapped up in a tight, satisfying way. It’s quite a feat to cram that much story into 72 hours, but I believed it was true to the way smart, determined Evy Stone would have lived, both before and after her death.

I haven’t read much urban fantasy beyond Jim Butcher and Laurel K. Hamilton, butThree Days to Dead makes me think I need to read more widely in the genre. It’s a definite keeper, and I’m certainly looking forward to Meding’s next book, As Lie the Dead, out in summer 2010.

I can be pretty ruthless about books when I have to; I  just took about a hundred or so to Half-Price Books so I could actually see the rest of them on my shelves.  But I’m also sentimental about old favorites.

One of the series that I read over and over as a kid was the first half of The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny.  It’s had a significant impact on my writing and probably far too great an impact on my general life outlook, considering the cynicism of Corwin, the main character.  But I had never owned a copy, always checking them out from my hometown library, a precarious situation indeed.  So I was elated when I found The Great Book of Amber on Amazon, then horrified when it started falling apart almost immediately.

But finally, I have my very own copy of the first five books in two volumes, with the covers done by Boris Vallejo.  This is the edition I first found in my small-town library, the edition I fell in love with.

True, I never liked the cover when I first read the books.  The figure doesn’t look at all how I envision Corwin, though the lack of shirt is nice.  Also, Corwin wore black and silver rather than blue jeans and red.  And that largish knife is not how his sword, Grayswandir, is supposed to look.  But that’s ok.  Nostalgia is seldom about accuracy.

Thankfully, I like the books nearly as much as I did when I was a kid.  I was a little worried, as I’ve reread other old favorites and been saddened by cliched plots, poor characterization, and awkward writing.  But I still love the odd blend of high court language and seventies slang that is Corwin’s unique voice.  The typos are kind of painful, but I can cope.

Now all I have to find is good clean copies of the second set of five books, about Corwin’s son Merlin, and my life will be complete.

One of my worst procrastination habits is testing new writing software.  I’m an organizational freak and can’t be content with just opening a new document and typing.  I need a program that lets me make timelines, outlines, and keep detailed character notes as well as all my research close to hand.  Also, I prefer to write in chunks of chapters or even scenes, and it would drive me crazy to have a separate document for each chapter, since SWORD AND KNIFE has 60 chapters.

My previous favorite writing program was Liquid Story Binder (LSBXE), which is a fantastic program.  Unfortunately, I run Ubuntu Linux and LSBXE just doesn’t run as well in Linux as it used to.  This is not the developer’s fault, as the program is only intended to run in Windows.  So if you use Windows, I definitely recommend trying LSBXE’s free 30-day trial.

But I decided I needed something more reliable for NaNoWriMo 2009, so I started testing new programs in October.  The one that best met my needs was SuperNotecard by Mindola Software.

It’s a Java program that runs on Windows and Mac and adapts easily to Linux.  (Instructions for running in Linux.)  It’s inexpensive at $29, with a trial version that reminds you to purchase after a deck has more than 20 cards.  It could easily be run forever without purchasing, but I found it well worth the money.

Complete review with a screenshot after the cut. (more…)

By far the most popular post on Here to Create is Resources for Fiction Writing, which I posted at the start of NaNoWriMo 2007. I flinch a little every time I see it’s still the most popular post, because I’ve known for a while that it has a lot of dead links.

So as a belated Christmas or a Happy New Year present to everyone who continues to link to it, I’ve checked all the links and revamped the post with new links in each section, as well as a new Revision section and a new Tools and Software section.  Cheers!

Well, as usual I’ve completely ignored any kind of logical progress toward clearly defined goals.  Last year, I decided to go easy on myself and just make it my goal to keep writing and keep learning.  That, at least, I’ve done.

Writing-wise, I finished the first draft of my 2008 NaNo, HUNTED MOON, around March.  I still haven’t finished the second draft though.  For some reason I’m completely bogged down on the antagonist parts, perhaps because they’re merely plot devices and not people to me in the same way the main characters are.  Sigh.  It still needs a lot of work.

While I was waiting for HUNTED MOON to cool, I attacked NYX again, trying to get past my obsessive tweaking and get some real work done.  Working on NYX, I realized that feeling my way forward wasn’t working for me, so I wrote an outline.  Surprise!  It’s a trilogy.  It’s not my fault; I only read epic fantasy as a child and the series structure is imprinted on my brain.

Over the summer I also worked on what was supposed to be a short story with a July anthology submission deadline.  But I just couldn’t get the structure to glue together, so I let the deadline go screaming past.  I looked at it again recently and decided it’s probably a novel too, or perhaps a novella.  Oh well, I never wanted to be a short story writer anyway.

I also came up with the first seed of this year’s NaNo over the summer.  As always, NaNoWriMo gave me a good kick in the butt as far as writing goes.  I managed to finish a complete draft of my 2009 NaNo, SWORD AND KNIFE, by the middle of December.  It’s also the longest piece I’ve ever written at 100,000 words and counting.

This year, especially November, has been all about trying new things and expanding my writing comfort zone.  I took on some really big thematic ideas in NYX, I tried to write a short story this summer, and with SWORD AND KNIFE I tackled epic fantasy for the first time in years, as well as multiple first person narrators.  I doubt all these experiments will pay off by themselves, but I’ve learned a lot just trying new things.  All I really want is to be able to look at my most recent story and see that it’s better than the one before that.  And I have confidence that the next one will be even better.

That’s all I’m really trying to do in 2010.  I want to get better, and the way to do that is to keep writing.  I want to learn how to revise this year, and I want to always be producing new ideas.   I want to continue to learn about the art and craft and business of writing.  I want to read more, both new and old.  Pretty simple on the surface, but it’ll be a lot of hard work, I guarantee.  And a lot of fun.

Happy New Year and good luck to you, whether you have your own list of goals or not :)