Doing nanowrimo again this year–like last year and the year before last, I’m mostly using it as a springboard to kickstart a novel-in-progress: this time is Harbinger of the Storm. Truth is, Nanowrimo is slightly above what I deem a comfortable writing speed: I’m more a 1,000-words-a-day kind of person than a 1,666-words-a-day madwoman. But the key point is peer pressure: seeing how everyone else is doing forces me to hammer away at the keyboard every day, or to make up for lost time.

Last year, it didn’t work out so well: I wrote perhaps 1/3 of Foreign Ghosts before real life intervened and I had to reschedule. However, in 2007, I got 50,000 words of Servant of the Underworld done over November (and, because I’m just that kind of madwoman, I got the other 50,000 words done over December. The BF’s comment on the whole process was something like “never again”, because he scarcely saw me for two months). This time, I’m allowing myself a longer period to write the draft (though winning nano would still be kind of cool).

Like 2007 and 2008, I have my roadmap: a more-or-less complete synopsis: 25 chapters, 4,000 words per chapter, knowing that the average length of a scene is around 2,000 words (1,000 words for the small ones, 3,000 for those where lots of things happen and/or lots of characters are present). The last three or four chapters are a great deal fuzzier than the first, because no novel plan survives the writing of the first draft; I’ll always end up making up stuff at the end according to what has gone on before, so might as well not waste time planning them in great detail. So far, so good. There have been a few hitches: namely, a lack of suspects (soon remedied: populating the imperial court with suspects was amazingly easy), and some research failure (the aforementioned dating problems which required me to spend a long evening poring over Aztec-to-Julian calendar correlations). But so far it’s going well.

Of course, things always deteriorate later on, in the Dreaded Middle. I’m hoping that if I write fast enough, I won’t have time to second guess myself (which happened with Foreign Ghosts, grinding everything to a halt because I was stupid enough to listen to my chattering inane monkeys and stop writing). Fingers crossed…

On related matters, there’s now a release date for books 1 and 2 in the US: Servant of the Underworld will be in bookstores in August 2010, and Harbinger of the Storm in November 2010. Wow. Sounds like World Fantasy will be a lot closer to my book release than I thought.

About 2 chapters and a bit into Harbinger of the Storm, and already struggling with continuity issues. For starters, I know I worked out all the dates for Servant of the Underworld using my trusty Aztec calendar–unfortunately, I lost the file somewhere in transit between my old laptop and the new mac. Bottom line, I’m rereading the manuscript and hoping for clues that will tell me when exactly everything was taking place…

Also, fun activity of the day: work out maths. If you know the European year for something (say, 1481), and the Aztec sacred day for something in the same year (say, One Movement), what is the European date? It’s trickier than it sounds, mostly because the Aztec system is so weird.

For starters, you have two calendars: one is the solar year, which is 365 days, and, like in most civilisations, is separated into months, in this case eighteen months of twenty days plus five “empty days”.

Then, overlapping it, you have the sacred or religious calendar, which is 260 days long. This is the one that has the cool day names like Seven Serpent, Two Jaguar and so on. It’s the one in which the divinatory records were made, and hence the one in which a lot of the dates come from. It doesn’t really have months: “Serpent” is a daysign that recurs every twenty days. The calendar goes something like this: you have thirteen numbers, and twenty day signs. You increment both simultaneously until you run out of numbers, wrap the numbers around to 1 while continuing to number the day-signs to 20, then wrap that around to 1, while continuing to count the day numbers to 13, and so on…
Simply put, if I use a second set of numerals for the day signs instead, the count goes 1-1, 2-2, … 13-13, 1-14, 2-15,… 7-20, 8-1, etc.
In full names, it goes all over the place: One Crocodile, Two Wind, Three House… Thirteen Reed, One Jaguar. Two Eagle, … Seven Flower, Eight Crocodile… It’s not quite as disorganised as it looks like: the key is not counting the months, but going instead for the trecenas, the groups of thirteen days that go from one to thirteen (in the example above, the first trecena runs from One Crocodile to Thirteen Reed, and the second trecena starts on One Jaguar).

Now, the Aztec Calendar lets you enter a date in Julian or Gregorian calendar, and gives you the Aztec date for this day (in this case, the solar year, the trecena, and the sacred day). The key is then working out where you are in the year, and how far ahead you have to advance to reach your goal of day One Movement in the year 1481 (which is solar year Two House). In practise, I worked out the trecena for the day One Movement, and how distant it was from the trecena for my random date (basically, for the maths geeks, count in increments of 13 modulo 20, which gives you the number of trecenas, ie the number of days, which you then convert back into months).

If that sounds painful and confusing, that’s because it is. But it worked–I now know where in the year the book is supposed to be set 🙂

Busy, busy (a mainstay of my life so far 🙂 )
The big news of the day is that I have (finally) started on Harbinger of the Storm. A bit over 2,000 words so far (had to pause to do laundry, dishwashing and other fun things in the same register). Right at the part where the priests start insulting each other. Should be fun…
And only a bit to go before a fave character walks back in. Darn, I love sequels. It’s like putting comfy old clothes on.

aka very, very busy. Just realised that I’d failed to book tickets for the British Museum’s Aztec exhibition, and that they were disappearing relatively fast (basically, no weekend availability until mid-December). So booked myself and the BF for December 12th, early morning. First time the BF and I go to London, so I can show him all the nice places (giant Waterstone’s, anyone?). Still not sure on the travelling, so we’ll have to do that too.

Also just saw that Quai Branly, Paris’s ethnological museum, was holding a special on Teotihuacan. Is it Mexico year, or something? (not that I’m complaining, just figuring out when we visit with a huge slobbering grin on my face).

I am currently salivating over the catalogue of the British Museum exhibition and the various souvenirs (and the BF is already worrying about how he’ll have to drag me out of the place).

Meanwhile, I have printed out the synopsis for Harbinger of the Storm, and have been rereading Servant of the Underworld and made notes about how to proceed (mostly for character coherence). I’m also rereading stuff about Aztec power and the imperial court. Should be able to start the draft soon-ish…

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll have to go and fight the laundry into submission (and the ironing, and the critting, and the cooking…)

So, now that I’ve got some decent sleep…

Spent the afternoon of yesterday at the BF’s PhD defence: he was working on quantum physics (entangled-photon sources, to be precise). I knew just enough quantum physics that the defence was somewhat familiar, but sadly not enough to actually understand most of what was going on. The question session lasted one hour (at which point they lost me completely), but in the end they awared him his PhD, with a Very Honorable Mention–which was pretty much the highest grade they could give him, so much happiness.

Then there was the cocktail, and the evening with drinks at Matthieu’s place–and I went to bed completely knackered. Slowly emerging now 🙂

-Sent revised version of Foreign Ghosts (the Xuya novel) to agent, and am now working on an appealing blurb they can use for marketing (and struggling a bit since this is multi-character in a weird setting).
-Updated the Servant of the Underworld page. I can haz blurbs!
-Got my synopsis for Book 2 of Servant of the Underworld approved by Angry Robot towers: it will tentatively be called Harbinger of the Storm. After much brainstorming, it looks like the series title has settled onto Obsidian and Blood.
Looks like book 2 of Obsidian and Blood is going to be the next project on my plate (right after I tackle the revisions for Servant of the Underworld).

Have I mentioned the bit where I feel perpetually swamped? I had some inkling that might be the lot of the novelist, but I didn’t think it would come quite that fast…