The Plot Bunny Farm

Good one for me to type up just now as I'm afraid I'm going to go overboard doing research that I really don't need to do right now.

Thursday, 9 p.m. Panelists included Elizabeth Bear (who admitted to being a former SCA herald), Patricia Bray, Kristine Smith (moderator), Sarah Monette, and Charles Coleman Finlay. Again, doing my best to paraphrase and indicate who actually said what.

on the basics of world-building:

Elizabeth Bear: Understand an existing society and make it work in a fantastical setting.

Patricia Bray: The iceberg theory--there's a lot of research that never appears in the book. "I want lizard-infested slums."

Elizabeth Bear: When you read intensively, the same things come up again and again, and those are the things to avoid. When I was researching Elizabethan period, the color "Dead Spaniard" came up in every book. I'm not using that.

Sarah Monette: Tolkien had this idea that heroes don't sweat in their clothes. But who does the laundry? What is the economy actually based on? i look at these more Marxist questions.

Charles Coleman Finlay: Can't have bathrooms without bathroom humor. I have a history background, and borrow some things directly, others indirectly.

Kristine Smith: Did you have a specific period in mind, specific technology? Or did you start with fantasy and pull out ideas from different periods?

Elizabeth Bear: Bunch of books sprawled over 400 years--picked periods by events or specific people. [She made a reference to Val Kilmer in Ghost in the Darkness, but I didn't write down precisely what she said.] I don't have as directed a process as Kris. I'm more like, "Oooh, shiny!"

Patricia Bray: I had some basic ideas and narrowed them down because I needed a certain speed and capacity for the ships -- technological issues.

Elizabeth Bear: Recycling research is very important.

Sarah Monette: I used my training as a literary scholar in Renaissance book's city--a mixture of Renaissance London and Dickensian London on the American continent. (Like Bear, if it's shiny, I want it.) My fourth book is in Darwinian London--how does a magical world get to Victorian era? I'm a magpie; I mix and match.

Charles Coleman Finlay: I like scope for my imagination--anything shiny, I'm interested in. All fiction is autobiography. Resonates with us. I grew up on a rural farm in Ohio, and I'm fascinated by differences in technology and how two societies interact, what happens to them. Not just finding one culture and borrowing, but seeing when cultures interact, what changes.

Kristine Smith: If mixing, how do you define mores? How do you decide on social systems and classes? Are they an amalgam, or do you create new ones?

Elizabeth Bear: Cold logic.

Sarah Monette: Depends on what feels right.

Patricia Bray: It helps to know people. How did history and society evolve to get to this point? It's important not to have monolithic societies.

Elizabeth Bear: Medieval or Renaissance people do not think and act like us. If you're going to write it, you have to be aware of the cultural differences. People change; cultures change. What we take as givens now wasn't given 20 years ago or 400 years ago.

Charles Coleman Finlay: People don't do things, cultures don't do things. Characters act. Being conflicted is as important for villains and minor characters as for main characters. They're not automatons, not programmed by their culture.

Kristine Smith: How do you know when enough research is enough?

Elizabeth Bear: Research is ongoing. As I'm doing research, I create a calendar and write down everything that's important to the plot, then I start filling in my own events and figure out how they fit together. You can rely on other people to do research for you, but you have to read extensively. After a while, you get a gestalt picture.

Patricia Bray: There's a point where you're comfortable with how much research you've done. If you've only read one book, that's not enough. You have to find the comfort level for what you do.

Sarah Monette: The important thing is you don't stop thinking.

Charles Coleman Finlay: History is really messy, full of contradictions and anomalies. Historians simplify, organize too much to create a coherent picture. There's value when you can look at primary sources for anomalous deails because those are the things too cool not to use.

audience question: How do you decide how much research to put in? Does SF vs. fantasy matter?

Kristine Smith: I'm a seat-of-the-pants writer. I buck it up when I'm boring myself and avoid "As you know, Bob."

Elizabeth Bear: Anytime you find yourself skimming your own writing, you've put too much in.

Sarah Monette: Filter your research through your characters. Only put in the things they would notice.

Charles Coleman Finlay: Follow the characters' personalities.

Patricia Bray: When I did research on lighthouses, I put in two details that those who really know about them would recognize as authentic and others wouldn't even notice were even there. You seed clues. If readers know you got a couple little details right, they'll trust you on the other things.

Elizabeth Bear: It gives the author confidence. Details are far better than generalities.

Your core audience is going to be the people who are geeks on the subject. You don't want to alienate them.

Sarah Monette: Take things you think are really cool and do things with them that never happened.

Charles Coleman Finlay: Create an intensive experience that emphasizes the cool, not a thin veneer.

Sarah Monette: You have to respect your sources.

question on cultural appropriation

Kristine Smith: You either appropriate them or you're a bigot because you only write about white cultures.

Sarah Monette: You take something because it's interesting. Write what you're passionate about.

audience question: How do you tell which telling detail to use?

Elizabeth Bear: The best one.

Charles Coleman Finlay: The one the character would notice, the one that sets up something later in the book, or just the coolest.

"You know 'em when you see 'em." [Sorry, not sure who said it.]

examples of cool details:

In France, there was a biology craze. The rich traveled with corpses in their carriages so they could dissect wherever they were.

When yellow fever struck Philadelphia, it was thought cigars kept the fumes of the sickness away, so there would be five- and six-year-olds on the street smoking cigars.

Raleigh had pearls on his jacket sewn on loosely so they would fall off if someone brushed against him.

They may seem like useless trivia, but work best if they get the reader to see, to say, "I understand now." The details tell you something about the characters.

Thursday, 5 p.m. Panelists were David Hartwell (moderator; editor at Tor), Stephen Jones (from England), James Minz (Del Rey), and Barbara Roden (Ashtree Press, from Canada) These are notes, not necessarily direct quotes, though I do attribute them to individual speakers.

There is more separation between fantasy and horror in the US. In the UK, publishing is publishing. (I didn't note who made this pithy comment.)

Stephen Jones: A few years ago, horror was coming out of a black hole, small presses were coming to the UK, but that all went away. It's reduced to 3 or 4 companies, owned by the Germans and the French. Now all are competing for the same market, and it's harder for mid-list authors to get published. Fewer editors specialize in the area.

There are no publicity budgets. No time, energy, or money to specialize. They concentrate on books that will make a profit for the company.

Barbara Roden: I can't really talk about fantasy. I'll focus on supernatural, primarily short stories. Short stories don't get recognition. A small press can publish books of short stories. For horror, the pendulum goes back and forth.

The Canadian market is based on what happens in England or the US. You can't get momentum with Canadian authors unless they can be a big seller in the US or UK as well. Small presses can be a stepping stone to larger things for authors. Everyone's looking for The Next Big Thing, and you won't get the push unless they think that's you. There are only one or two at the top of the heap, and everyone else is scrambling.

Stephen Jones: Everything for Canada also holds true for Australia. [me: I'll post notes for the panel on Australian fantasy later this week, so that will have more details, I think.]

James Minz: Australians have problems getting distribution.

David Hartwell: No mainstream publisher in Canada has ever been interested in developing genre; Australia had Harper.

Barbara Roden: Hutchison did a series a few years back, but it lost what it had.

David Hartwell: Canada has no law as the US does about monopolies. The second-largest Canadian bookstore chain bought out the largest, then went bankrupt, which collapsed distributors and half the publishers in Canada. Recovery has been coming in bits and pieces.

Stephen Jones: WH Smith set themselves up as main chain and distributor in England. They insisted on books being marketed as they chose, with covers of their design. They started to lose money. Everything they told everyone was wrong. They became too powerful and destroyed the industry.

James Minz: Symptom of the times, of society as a whole--fractionation of the market. You see it with cable and satellite TV. There are hundreds of choices but few main markets, and even they are getting divided. Everyone is fighting for smaller pieces of the pie, which is why small presses can do well.

David Hartwell: There's a difference between getting known and getting paid.

James Minz: It's easier to start big because it's hard to fight mid-list history as an author. There's no industrial memory, no institutional history.

Barbara Roden: Ramsey Campbell's discussion board. What makes "dark horror"? Not doing anyone a favor by subdividing what's already a small genre.

Stephen Jones: It started with trying to use "dark fantasy" to market horror.

James Minz: Publishers do make marketing decisions, but they also need a product to sell.

Stephen Jones and David Hartwell both agreed that it's got to be product.

David Hartwell: Historically, publishing and books do well versus other entertainment in economic down times. Probably heading for good times for the industry.

James Minz: But it costs more to ship books than CDs or DVDs.

David Hartwell: There are 10 major and 3 minor publishers of genre in the US--still a large segment; haven't had the kind of collapse that happened in the UK, France, and a lot of the west in the 80s and 90s. Trade publishing was preserved. A lot was sold to German conglomerates, which is good for Germany because in tough times they can take money from the US and UK to Germany.

Superficial--lot of money to buy books from big name authors. It's set up to use money rather than expertise to succeed. Multinationals don't do fiction; they prefer fact, nonfiction. Trying to make nonfiction sell bigger, with some success. They don't care if I know the field, only if I've used their money to buy another best seller. Twice, I was told they don't care if my division is making money because they aren't interested in publishing that kind of material, and I was fired. Now I'm at Tor, and I plan to stay.

If we cultivate talent, we might get the next best seller. Not really trying to make money from a book if not giving big advances.

Stephen Jones: This is one market that still exists and is rather healthy. Selling American publishers world rights. Very difficult to make a living by being a writer. Advances are often $500-$1,000. [me: Compare this with Tobias Buckell's survey, previously linked from this blog.] Short stories are even harder. People can't afford to do it. Make less money now than did ten years ago, and it's difficult without a second job.

The same is true with a small press. The money you'll get for something that will sell 500 copies if you're lucky will only keep you going a couple of weeks. But you get stuck in the cycle."

Barbara Roden: "You're a small press writer, and that's all you'll ever be." It's the minor leagues in baseball. Can't make it sell, even if it's good.

Stephen Jones: That's one good thing about year's best anthologies; they pull work out to a larger audience. And, once a writer becomes big, they can go back to small press to do projects that they want to.

David Hartwell: There's a 150 year horror short fiction tradition. Not true for fantasy, which was more or less invented in 70s by Del Rey, who were trying to reproduce the effect of Tolkien's trilogy. People who read fantasy novels much less frequently read short fiction.

James Minz: There are two rough paradigms. There's the pet project, something different, that can get the industry excited. Then there's the big book like other previous best sellers.

Barbara Roden: Look back to pulp magazines, how many markets were available for writers to hone their craft, get their name out there and known. There's nowhere for writers to get their name out there and known now.

Stephen Jones: There aren't that many fantasy magazines--Realms of Fantasy, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, which has a bit of everything.

James Minz: Horror is at its best short, science fiction is also very good, but fantasy isn't necessarily at its best.

audience question: Market bubbles: why do they continue? Do any companies make enough money to go through crash afterward?

To keep the competition from getting a crushing share of the market. Everyone tears off a piece to keep someone else from making tons of money off it. Just meet expectations for this fall, make the bottom line look good NOW, even if it means putting out money to ride a trend, even if you know it's going to burst because you need the support of the people paying the salaries.

audience question: Given the general older age of readers, is anything being done to pull younger readers to the field?

Harry Potter phenomenon. YA books in fantasy and horror are easy to sell.

Halo books (SF) are doing well.

Make more money, sell more copies. But no evidence of cross-over to nonseries books.

Barbara Roden: Even if it's a fraction crossing over--1 in 100 or 1 in 1,000--it's better than 0.

audience question: Are genres mixing and merging? (SF/F/H)

There's so much out there, people can discriminate, and the buy just what they want.

About cross-genre stuff: Have to know what section of the bookstore to shelve books, or they won't get picked up by a publisher.

The second panel I attended, 3 p.m. on Thursday, was Medicine for Writers, with panelists Lisa Freitag (a pediatrician and program organizer for the con) and Angela Lathrop (a veterinarian). Their other title for the panel was "Maim 'em Right."

Lisa's pet peeve -- a movie, rather than a book -- was in LOTR. What really was wrong with Aragorn? Was it supposed to be a head injury? Makeup was all wrong, and he should've been experiencing symptoms for hours or days afterward unless he was mystically healed by Arwen -- in which case, why wasn't it instantaneous?

Angela's pet peeve involves anatomy and nomenclature. It's the carotid artery, not vein, and lots of other things would get in the way and get hurt too if you were cutting it.

There was some discussion of "flesh wound" being an undefined term.

Fighting with a dislocated shoulder: you can't. It's stuck, and the muscles won't be at the right angles to move.

Concussion: few seconds to a few minutes unconscious, some retrograde amnesia, nausea, headaches. (More discussion about Aragorn.)

They mentioned the existence of a Coma Scale, from 1 to 10. Angela commented it wasn't precisely the same because you can't ask animals questions like what the date is or who's president.

A question was asked about long-term memory loss and what triggers its return. "Weird stuff happens." No good answers. Joke about "trans-cranial magnetic waves"

How far can you fall and survive? Being feline helps. It depends on what you fall on, how you fall, whether there's something to absorb the shock, how limp you are, what the ratio of muscle to body size is . . . landing on the head is bad, though. They suggest trying for no more than 1-2 stories, though some kids have survived 3-4 story falls.

Recommendation for D. P. Lyle's Web site, where he answers questions on medicine/forensics (http://www.dplylemd.com).

Infection from a sword wound? Bacteria from the skin get pushed into the wound. Anything that pierces the gut allows the bacteria that are there to ooze out. How long to incubate? A couple hours for flesh-eating bacteria to several days. A person can pine away for a long time. Peeve of Lisa: sepsis. Sepsis is extreme condition that needs to be treated with long courses of antibiotics; don't have someone find the right herb in the wilderness, chew it once, and get immediately better.

Angela commented that chocolate really isn't as bad for dogs as they say -- more like having 5 cups of coffee. Arrhythmia, if bad enough, could kill. Can use this for not killing off an animal when would expect to. (Shucks! There goes my plan to get rid of werewolves by serving them mole!)

What about tetanus on swords? Tetanus has to come from somewhere. It's carried by spores, but they're not omnipresent. (Lisa comments that the best way to poison a sword is to poop on it -- and it has to be a deep wound, anaerobic.)

The Red Book, published by the CDC, describes illnesses, including incubation times. (Available on-line at http://aapredbook.aappublications.org)

Healing time for extensive second or third degree burns, if clothes on fire? First degree burns have red skin, no blisters, pain gone in a couple days. Second degree burns blister, peel off over a week, granulate from the edges, can take a couple weeks to heal -- need to keep covered to prevent infection and moisturized so the tissue doesn't dry out. Third degree burns ooze. If the skin is pink under the blister, it will grow back. If gray, need skin grafts. Watch for skin contractures -- need to keep pressure around joints to make sure skin grows right and joint can be moved later.

Catnip is effective on tigers. (They didn't say this, but from my grad school days, I know that catnip activates cat-specific serotonin receptors. Not all cats have tho same subtype of receptor, which is why not all cats are affected.)

Can treat wild animals at larger wet facilities. Angela told of a time they treated a mountain lion. They kept it in a horse stall that didn't go all the way to the ceiling. They realized the problem before it climbed up to get the horse put in the stall next door. They won't treat primates because they carry too many diseases humans are susceptible to, and they bite.

Adrenaline rush? Don't expect it to last too long, maybe a fraction of a minute. Lisa said she doesn't think there are any documented cases of mothers pulling cars off their children, etc. Can ignore injuries for a long time, though, unless bleeding too much.

"There is probably a reasonably medically accurate way to make what you want to happen, happen." (incapacitate, suffer, recover, etc.) Write it first, then get depth and detail by finding people it's happened to.