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Elizabeth Moon
I got to meet Elizabeth Moon today! My friend's aunt goes to the church where she sings in the choir, so they set up a meeting with about 10 people who were fans. Oh, it was so very cool, and interesting, and informative.
She's a great, funny lady with grey hair, very friendly and confident. We talked mainly about the Paksenarrion books, which she was okay with because she thought Paks was the most fun to write. She mentioned that Paks never came back to her; Paks decided that her story was done, and Elizabeth could never convince her otherwise.
I asked a lot of questions about the writing process, which I'm going to set down here mainly for my own memory, and some of you might find it interesting. She follows the "butt in chair" school of writing (TM Jane Yolen), and sets a goal of a certain number of pages each day. She tends to overwrite, especially to explore characters, and she said that in her 'inefficient' early years, she would write entire sections to background characters like Duke Phelan.
To write the polearms training sequence, she apparently made spears out of wood and river reeds, and recruited the neighborhood kids to train with them. Most of their mistakes ended up in the books, and well as formation training with shields.
I really enjoyed hearing about her editing network, since I have an odd fascination with that process. One of the things she emphasized was what Lois McMaster Bujold told her, which brought her writing up a level: revising is not just correcting mistakes, it's "re-visioning," a concept she had missed the first time around.
She has alpha readers, like her husband, who read as she writes, and discuss the story with her when she has the time. They give her visceral reactions to the piece, but aren't allowed to tell her what to do. Then she has beta readers, who are the critical division, and tell her where she screwed up plot- or characterwise. This includes her writer friends, who prod her back into writing when she has authorial self-doubt. To put it another way, when she's banging her head against the wall, they hand her an icepack and tell her to get back to work ;)
After she has the novel in fairly decent shape, she hands it over to the nitpickers, who have been chomping at the bit to correct typos and name misuse and continuity errors. The editors are the last step. She told a funny story about turning in a very 'clean' manuscript that she thought was spotless. It came back with purple Post-Its covering it like fur ;)
She talked about collaborating with Anne McCaffrey, which wasn't to interesting to me because I have problems with her writing, but I can talk about it if anyone wants to know.
Elizabeth also explained the whole production process to us, which was a vast help to me, and which clarified the need for deadlines. Moving backwards from the retailers, a respectable publishing company has a certain number of contractual new-book slots on the shelf each month (say, 10). Factor in 3 weeks for shipping, 3 weeks for processing, getting the manuscript to the binders at the same time as the covers (which have to be conceptualized, created, approved, finalized, and sent off), plus scheduling the printers previous to that, and you come up with a very complex time crunch. Before that, you have all the editing that goes on, so deadlines are very sensible, and when you are a reliable deadline-meeter, the publishers pay you more.
I asked about her research, and that was very informative, since she got a degree in history at Rice (hilariously, Lindsey was wearing her Rice shirt, another man there had worn his, and I wore my Rice hoodie). She recommended reading simple overview books, then discovering the experts in the field, and eventually contacting them through email to ask for any help you need. She said that having a network of experts is amazingly useful, and to build it up over the years. She also basically said that the Internet was crap for that level of research, though mailing lists can help with obscure facts. For example, she was trying to find the commander of the WWI British Mediterranean destroyer group, and finally was helped by this naval history who had seen the original documentation on a visit to England.
Of course, I asked her for her opinion on fanfiction, and she told me something I had never heard before. She said that her initial objection is that she doesn't want to see other people's take on Paks. She knows other people see her differently, but it's that whole "But she's *my* character!" thing, and while thinking differently in their heads is okay, she hates to be confronted with the concrete form of it. Part of that is, from what she said, to be blamed on some truly bad fic that some fan had the poor taste to mail to her *shudders*
The part that surprised me was whe she said that fanfiction can actually destroy the copyright. I believe she said it "clouds the authorship of the original work," and that authors can lose their copyright if they don't fight that kind of activity. I was not aware of this, and I don't know if that's covered by disclaimers. Does anyone know anything about the legal aspect of this?
She's not anti-fan in any way, however. She talked quite a bit about conventions, and her awe at the organizers for structuring an event for thousands of people with such flair. In fact, she inspired me to try and check out some regional conventions more seriously, like ArmadilloCon. (Oy, more things to spend money on ;)) She's also a filk lover, apparently, which was a suprise to me as I've never been exposed to any good filk, but apparently there's some out there.
Overall, it was just so very, very cool that I can't get over it. I refrained from squeeing, but it was a near thing ;) Anyway, must go do homework now, since there was none of that early today, and certainly none yesterday...
She's a great, funny lady with grey hair, very friendly and confident. We talked mainly about the Paksenarrion books, which she was okay with because she thought Paks was the most fun to write. She mentioned that Paks never came back to her; Paks decided that her story was done, and Elizabeth could never convince her otherwise.
I asked a lot of questions about the writing process, which I'm going to set down here mainly for my own memory, and some of you might find it interesting. She follows the "butt in chair" school of writing (TM Jane Yolen), and sets a goal of a certain number of pages each day. She tends to overwrite, especially to explore characters, and she said that in her 'inefficient' early years, she would write entire sections to background characters like Duke Phelan.
To write the polearms training sequence, she apparently made spears out of wood and river reeds, and recruited the neighborhood kids to train with them. Most of their mistakes ended up in the books, and well as formation training with shields.
I really enjoyed hearing about her editing network, since I have an odd fascination with that process. One of the things she emphasized was what Lois McMaster Bujold told her, which brought her writing up a level: revising is not just correcting mistakes, it's "re-visioning," a concept she had missed the first time around.
She has alpha readers, like her husband, who read as she writes, and discuss the story with her when she has the time. They give her visceral reactions to the piece, but aren't allowed to tell her what to do. Then she has beta readers, who are the critical division, and tell her where she screwed up plot- or characterwise. This includes her writer friends, who prod her back into writing when she has authorial self-doubt. To put it another way, when she's banging her head against the wall, they hand her an icepack and tell her to get back to work ;)
After she has the novel in fairly decent shape, she hands it over to the nitpickers, who have been chomping at the bit to correct typos and name misuse and continuity errors. The editors are the last step. She told a funny story about turning in a very 'clean' manuscript that she thought was spotless. It came back with purple Post-Its covering it like fur ;)
She talked about collaborating with Anne McCaffrey, which wasn't to interesting to me because I have problems with her writing, but I can talk about it if anyone wants to know.
Elizabeth also explained the whole production process to us, which was a vast help to me, and which clarified the need for deadlines. Moving backwards from the retailers, a respectable publishing company has a certain number of contractual new-book slots on the shelf each month (say, 10). Factor in 3 weeks for shipping, 3 weeks for processing, getting the manuscript to the binders at the same time as the covers (which have to be conceptualized, created, approved, finalized, and sent off), plus scheduling the printers previous to that, and you come up with a very complex time crunch. Before that, you have all the editing that goes on, so deadlines are very sensible, and when you are a reliable deadline-meeter, the publishers pay you more.
I asked about her research, and that was very informative, since she got a degree in history at Rice (hilariously, Lindsey was wearing her Rice shirt, another man there had worn his, and I wore my Rice hoodie). She recommended reading simple overview books, then discovering the experts in the field, and eventually contacting them through email to ask for any help you need. She said that having a network of experts is amazingly useful, and to build it up over the years. She also basically said that the Internet was crap for that level of research, though mailing lists can help with obscure facts. For example, she was trying to find the commander of the WWI British Mediterranean destroyer group, and finally was helped by this naval history who had seen the original documentation on a visit to England.
Of course, I asked her for her opinion on fanfiction, and she told me something I had never heard before. She said that her initial objection is that she doesn't want to see other people's take on Paks. She knows other people see her differently, but it's that whole "But she's *my* character!" thing, and while thinking differently in their heads is okay, she hates to be confronted with the concrete form of it. Part of that is, from what she said, to be blamed on some truly bad fic that some fan had the poor taste to mail to her *shudders*
The part that surprised me was whe she said that fanfiction can actually destroy the copyright. I believe she said it "clouds the authorship of the original work," and that authors can lose their copyright if they don't fight that kind of activity. I was not aware of this, and I don't know if that's covered by disclaimers. Does anyone know anything about the legal aspect of this?
She's not anti-fan in any way, however. She talked quite a bit about conventions, and her awe at the organizers for structuring an event for thousands of people with such flair. In fact, she inspired me to try and check out some regional conventions more seriously, like ArmadilloCon. (Oy, more things to spend money on ;)) She's also a filk lover, apparently, which was a suprise to me as I've never been exposed to any good filk, but apparently there's some out there.
Overall, it was just so very, very cool that I can't get over it. I refrained from squeeing, but it was a near thing ;) Anyway, must go do homework now, since there was none of that early today, and certainly none yesterday...