Mangling the Iambic...

Last night at KGB/Fantastic Fiction, in addition to my novel excerpt, I read a wee something I wrote twisted a while back, and read every time I have a new book coming out, so it seemed Appropriate to perform in honor of my co-reader Mary Robinette Kowal's's First Novel.

Since it went over well, I am hereby reproducing it for y'all.

To Book or Not to Book

To brace or not to brace; that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The inevitability of that Klausner review,
Or to take refuge against a poor store display,
And by ignoring deny them? To work: to weep;
No more; and by weeping to say we endure
The heart-ache and the thousand returned books
An author is prone to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To work, to weep;
To weep: perchance to go out of stock: aye, there's the rub;
For in that work of bookstores what fears may come
When we have shuffled off this contractual coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of too little backlist;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of Locus,
The reviewers' wrong, the disappointed reader's spite,
The pangs of despised love, the payment's delay,
The insolence of wannabes and the spurns
That patient merit of the unpublished takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a delete button? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of there being nothing after,
The remainder'd country from whose bourn
No author returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus publishing doth make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And manuscripts of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the pacing of action. - Soft you now!
The fair New York Times list! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my words remember'd.




This work by Laura Anne Gilman is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.


And, for those interested, a few photos from the evening, via and © Ellen Datlow:
( behind the cut for f-list mercy )

Many thanks to everyone who came out last night -- Mary and I were both "who are these people, do you know them?" which means we had total strangers there. That is always So Cool.

All Day Writing.

I spent ten minutes contemplating "attack and defense" versus "attack and counterattack."

They sound the same, but they're so very different. And who is saying it matters as much as what they're trying to convey. Even moreso when it's one character talking about what another character is thinking. So you have A's intent and B's interpretation of what A's intent is, and it's all under the surface and totally unconscious on the part of the characters but me? I have to be conscious of it.

Multiple-voice, multi-layered stories make my head hurt.

I'm so deep into the minutia of this book, I can't see the larger picture any more. One more day of work, I think and then it's time for my betas to take over.


A man who believed in his own destiny was a man who would fight for it. A man in control of his life would accomplish things that were otherwise impossible. And if control was an illusion, fate a fickle wind under another's command?

He would keep that knowledge to himself.



Also, on another topic entirely, since kradical already said it quite well, my take on the whole idiotic "mosque at Ground Zero" bullshit-athon.