Haven’t done this for a while: writing from 11 pm to 1 am. In my so far unending quest for an agreeable time and place to swim, I went to the late swim, which ended at 10:30. Then I came home and tackled one of the 4 key scenes from the first part of Graveyards, that I either don’t have or don’t have in the form I’d like. 2100 words of monologue later, I’m part way into one character’s story, feeling my way around inside her mood and her machinations. Any time any character of mine tells someone else something, whether it’s information or their story, there’s an agenda at work. They want something, to make sure what the other person knows is shaped by them, or to engage the other person’s sympathies; they want the other person to take action on their behalf, or not to take action on someone else’s behalf. So many different types of struggle can be waged in words. (I’ve mentioned elsewhere my liking for drama). This monologue will need massive cuts, or it will be 10 000 words long by the time she has covered all the strategic terrain she intends to, but first I must write out everything that comes, and then I will pare it to the essentials, move some parts of it to fill out other scenes. I like the kind of looseness that comes when I stay up until my eyes practically close on their own. Though I will not like the consequences in the morrow. I used to write a lot like this in my 20s; I’m not sure that I had more stamina, maybe I was simply less responsible about maintaining quality of mind for my day-work.

Working on a scene in which a ruler-in-exile meets a man from off-planet she hopes will help restore her to her rightful place. I’m describing what they’re wearing, with in my ears David Gerrold’s plaint (made last year at Rustycon), about women writers who insist on stopping the scene to describe what people are wearing. This he found irrelevant and tedious. Though I piped up that it makes a difference who your viewpoint is: a tailor, for instance, would notice what people are wearing. But I have been rereading some of Baen books free library on my Palm: military SF, and some of those writers go into great detail about military ordnance, its history, its provenance, and its effect on tactics, because it’s all relevant to the story, part of the world building (I like it, but then I like information in a story). I don’t see why clothing should not be viewed in the same way, as a technology, and as world building. I wonder if women writers treat it differently than men. Or whether the divide is between people who have studied history and other cultures and learned to analyse the social languages of clothes. It may be you have to step outside your own culture to be able to understand the language of your own clothes – I know we have one – or several – they seem muted and muddled. And if you haven’t had that perspective, you don’t know just how much clothes say.