Apparently, we weren’t the only ones who had to attend a wedding last weekend. Von went to one too (duuuude, like, synchronicity…), and it turns out her thoughts on wedding music are very close to the ones I was having last Saturday.

Says Von:

The music was really really bad after a very promising start. The happy couple’s first dance was a beautiful song from Rob Thomas that I’d never heard before. After that it was all “Celebration” and “We are family” and blah blah blah. Just plain BAD. I hate that.

Our wedding was one of those package deals: the venue where the reception was held took care of everything but the photographer. So when we went to the company they worked with for DJs, we had very specific ideas in mind. There were several tapes of their DJs, and I watched the first few in horror.

I understand that you want someone playing lively music, who will keep up the guests’ energy throughout the night, but there were several of these guys who went beyond that. When your DJ is out on the floor whooping it up with the guests, and breaking out a box of sombreros and feather boas, he’s stolen the show. Now, I’m not that big on being in the spotlight, but goddammit, it was my wedding, and I wasn’t about to take a backseat to some loud guy with a microphone and maracas.

The last tape was of a guy in his late 40s, just… playing music. He announced the bride and groom without yukking it up, he reined everyone in for the cake cutting without being a dick, and seemed pretty all-around unobtrusive. I’m not sure why he was at the bottom of the video pile - up until we popped his tape in, I was feeling more and more dejected, figuring we’d have to re-watch all of the previous DJs to see which one was the least obnoxious. Then there’s Eddie and I nearly leapt out of my seat going “OMG YES. THIS. THIS ONE. BOOK HIM NOW.”

When we met with him a week or two later, he had this big folder with all the songs in his repertoire. You could see the first few pages were lists of the ones that got played all the time. As soon as we got started, we declared that that shit was right out. No “Celebration.” No “We Are Family.” No “Old Time Rock and Roll,” no “December ‘63,” and dear sweet zombie Jesus, NO CHICKEN DANCE.*

He lit up. Well, he lit up as much as a low-key, very laid back kind of DJ can. I’m guessing it had been a while since he’d been able to actually play different music at a wedding. Sometimes it feels like the DJ can just pop in a CD of typical wedding songs and then zone out for the next four hours. No way in hell was I going to have that.

Now, I have a feeling this post is going to be one of those foot-in-mouth moments, where one of you will be all “Gee, thanks, falconesse. All those songs you’re snobbing it up over were played at my wedding.” Let me state for the record: I’m not out to insult anyone. I will not love you any less if you rocked out to “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” I just don’t like the idea that the guy I’m paying several hundred dollars to entertain the guests can put in a CD of Stuff We Play Every Frickin’ Night and then essentially go afk. Okay? Okay.

So, yes. The wedding Greg and I went to last weekend was much the same as the one Von attended, only with a live band.

I am also likely kind of bitter. I’m guessing this song came back into wedding popularity with There’s Something About Mary - I know I’ve heard it as the exit-music song at just about every wedding I’ve attended since the movie released. I have been unable to get “Build Me Up Buttercup” out of my head for the last FIVE GORRAM DAYS.

*We had to allow the Electric Slide, which broke me a little, but Greg digs it, so, y’know. Marriage and compromise and all that.

I’ve been horribly neglectful with the postings, both here and at the book blog. But, I’ve been doing a bit of writing recently, so I’m going to go ahead and forgive myself. I hope you’ll forgive me, too. It’s mostly WoW-related stuff. I’m eyeing my short story sidelong, kind of pretending it’s not there, in the hopes that it’ll start talking to me and demanding attention.

Right now, I think it’s doing the same thing to me.

Maybe the idea of stories and characters taking on personalities of their own sounds odd, but there’s truth to it. I’m not going to go quite as far as using the metaphor of stories/books as babies (especially since, when the manuscript’s done, you’re probably sending it off to the slush pile - a place where it will be stacked atop many other manuscripts in a storeroom or a closet or some editor’s floor and largely ignored for a very long time. Do that sort of thing to a kid and someone’s going to call social services…)

However, there are ideas that sometimes come so randomly that, even though they came from somewhere in our writerly heads, we’re not quite sure how they got there.

Lori lets me know I’m not alone in this:

Last night as I was brushing my teeth, “Crowmaker” wandered into the bathroom and tugged at my sleeve and said, “Hey, I think I wanna grow up to be a novel. Just think about it, OK?”

It’s so true. They do things like that all the time. Years ago (warning: gamer-geek jargon ahead), while I was setting up my list of NPCs for a game I was running (Mage: The Ascension, for the curious), someone who was supposed to be just a throw-away character decided she wanted a bigger role.

It went something like…

Me: Okay, T.C. Garrett. Verbena. White hair, weird blend of fashionista and hippie chick.
T.C.: Psst. I have wings.
Me: No, you don’t. You’re going to help bring Maddy to meet the group, and then you’re going to be forgotten.
T.C.: Wings and a glowy sword.
Me: No, you don’t. Go sit over there with Clay and Caroline. I’m done with you.
T.C.: Also, I’m an angel.
Me: No, you fucking aren’t.
T.C.: Yes I am. I’m in charge of guarding the kid.
Me: No, you… oh, hey, wait. That might be kind of cool.
T.C.: *smug*

She turned out to be a pretty cool character.

So, sometimes, when ideas come like that, it’s worth listening to them. Which is why my posting has been non-existant the last week or so. Blogging can often be productive, but there are times when it’s merely cat vacuuming. I have to find the balance between the two.

I am a terrible slacker.

Though, it’s not even that. I’ve sat down to write here and there over the last few weeks and just ended up staring at the keyboard. Part of it is, honestly, simply needing to suck it up and start typing.

I have a short story I’m poking at, and depending on the day, any of three longer projects still in their larval stages.

I have unfinished stories for pretty much all of my WoW characters - a long overdue one for Threnn, one for Anna that’s been slowly revealing itself to me, one for my troll shaman. I’m thinking that poor Davien needs to claw her way back into the world of plot progression.

It’s not even something I’d describe as writer’s block. The stories are there, waiting. I’ve been neglectful, letting them go untouched. I can blame a bit of it on waiting to hear back from Weird Tales about “Kate.” As much as I know the rule goes something like, “write something, clean it up, submit it, then start working on the next thing while you’re waiting for an answer,” I stalled out anyway.

Well, I heard back this weekend, and the answer is no. It doesn’t surprise me, really, and I’m not all that disappointed. I will probably look around for other places to submit it and send it back out into the wilds of “HAI, PUBLISH MAH STUFFZ” once more, but it’s kind of a monster. “Kate” clocks in at somewhere around 6,000 words, pushing the upper limits of what magazines are looking for in their short fiction submissions. I’m sure there are things that can be cut, and reworking that can be done, but I’m not sure if one rejection is the signal to overhaul the whole thing (after all, it went through several revisions before I decided it was time to submit.)

I’m also sorely tempted to not resubmit it just yet, shove it back into the drawer from whence it came, and forget about it for another year or two. I don’t feel like it’s my strongest work, even though others have disagreed. Putting myself in an editor’s shoes, I don’t know if I’d select it for publication. Question is, am I saying that because I’m doubting the strength of my own writing, or because I really, really don’t think it’s all that great?

Pretty sure it’s the latter. I could point you to pieces I’m proud to say I’ve written, and every single one of them would be stronger (in my mind) than “Kate.” (And if anyone would like to test the veracity of this claim, I’m happy to email “Kate” to you or share the google doc.)

Anyway, it’s odd - now that the rejection has officially come, I feel more motivated to work on other things. Isn’t it supposed to be the opposite? Shouldn’t I be doubling up on the “I am such a hack” whining?

So. The cobwebs seem to be clearing. Productivity shall recommence.

*Butt-in-Chair Time: one of the most important keys to writing, as told by Uncle Jim.

I am an occupational hazard waiting to happen today. I wish I could say that the stacks of samples perched willy-nilly along the edges of my cube’s walls were the building blocks for a Fortress of Evil, but alas. It’s awfully hard to make a Fortress of Evil out of colorful children’s books. Bunnies and farm animals just aren’t all that intimidating.

So, instead, I watch as people walk by and cringe if someone’s footfalls are too heavy, waiting for the inevitable crash. I’ll have a hell of a mess to clean up if they fall (and maybe some apologizing to do, if the heavy-treaded ones are too close.) But right now, there’s nowhere else to put anything; there’s so much sample material that it has overtaken the surface of my desk and made me resort to the stacking of things atop narrow ledges.

However, once it’s all mailed out and the leftovers put away, I am sorely tempted to open up a package of monsters and a package of knights and lay out a battlefield along my desktop.

The only problem with that is that Cthulhu is one of the monsters (yes, we have a children’s book featuring the greatest of the Great Old Ones.) I think he might eat all the others, rather than side with the rest of the hellspawn.

And then, when I come in one day and find that all my coworkers have turned into fish people, I’ll feel really bad.

Look! The Vatican says it’s okay to believe in aliens!

I’m not quite sure how we’re meant to take that, though. I mean, hooray for God’s creative freedom, but then, doesn’t it follow that He condones alien abductions, too?

Or… are the ones joyriding around Earth and picking up people for experimentation Satan’s intergalactic minions?

For Grizz, Deb, and Avery:

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.

(I know, I know.  I desperately need to update my links.  This should be there on the sidebar.)

…to seeing Iron Man (which was so, so good) earlier this week is that now I can’t get the gorram Black Sabbath song out of my head.

I’m not a businessperson, so this particular statement about Yahoo turning down Microsoft’s offer confuses me:

(From Reuters)

“They’ve prioritized employees over shareholders in the hopes that someday they can create more than $8 billion of value, even if they have no track record of doing so,” she said.

I dunno; I’m not a major shareholder in any company, so maybe this is why I don’t get it. From my perspective, Yahoo putting their employees first is a good thing.

Maybe it’s because five years ago, the big ol’ company that owned the publisher I work for was trying to sell us to another, larger publisher. For several months, we were all waiting for the sale to go through and the pink slips to start going out - there’s no need for two customer service departments, two billing departments, two IT teams, etc. The other publisher already had those in their New York offices. Maybe some Boston people would be given the option to move, but very few of us would have taken it. When that deal fell through, it was a sigh of relief.

I think I have a pretty good idea of the relief plenty of Yahoo employees are feeling right now.

Reading further into the article, I understand that this “walking away” on Microsoft’s part might not be the end, that the sale might still happen anyway. I’m also sure that Yahoo has other reasons for refusing the deal than just its employees.

Still, if the people who work for the company are important factors in their decision, my hat is off to Yahoo.

Even when they’re not updating with new posts, Making Light’s particles are bottled awesome.

Today brings the shiny from Jo Walton, on creating fantasy names and words.

So much of my writing begins with me agonizing over names. I’ve managed to get over the need to choose a title before I can start - several of my works-in-progress are saved as something that lets me recognize what is within the file - “Running,” “Karris,” “Vamp Story,” (which, by the way, isn’t about vampires at all, since within three pages it had changed into something else entirely. But if I changed the title, I’d have no idea what was in there.) That used to cripple me, though, this feeling that I had to have a great title before I could do anything else.

I grew out of that.

Naming characters is a completely different matter. The names you give them sticks with them through the whole of the tale. They don’t always have to be symbolic, but they do have to sound right. It’s hard enough choosing names for stories set in our own reality (or one very close to our reality). Now imagine finding them for a world where the native tongue isn’t any language that’s ever been spoken on Earth.

There’s a fine line you have to walk in making up names and places and words - you can’t just throw a bunch of Scrabble tiles into a bag, draw out five or six, and write down whatever comes out.

Well, you can, but what you end up with is going to be inconsistent and most likely hard to pronounce. Readers are going to pick up on those inconsistencies, whether they can point right at it and say, “That name doesn’t follow the pattern for that fictional country,” or they just think it sounds off, they’re going to know.

Also, some names are simply more aurally pleasing than others. I once read an article somewhere (which I’ll go searching for) talking about the patterns of syllables in first and last names, and how people hear them, the feelings they invoke before you even know anything about the subject - this person is smart, this person is strong, I wouldn’t let this person within 500 yards of my house.

There’s a young adult series that’s done pretty well from the day it came out, called Cirque du Freak. Boys love it - it’s gory, it’s scary, it’s fun. I’ve met the author; he’s enthusiastic and funny and loves what he does. I read the first few titles, and one thing that yanked me out of the story right from the start were the names. The main character becomes a half-vampire. His sire’s name is Larten Crepsley.

Larten Crepsley.

I still don’t know what it was about that name that makes me cringe. The character himself has an interesting backstory; I actually enjoyed the scenes that featured him. But that name… There are more like it throughout the series - Harkat Mulds is another that comes to mind - and I wonder how Shan went about christening his characters.

I’m curious to see if those names strike any of you as a bit off or if anyone wants to volunteer examples of their own. These seem to me like syllables thrown together haphazardly. They don’t roll off the tongue very well.

I like to think I’ve done all right with names in things I’ve written. Most of my stuff is set in either present-day or near-future Earth, so I can get away without making up new names. There is one project I keep drifting back to, though, where I have a ton of world-building to do. I think Ms. Walton’s formula might come in handy.