Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-15 08:46 pm

Holy crap, you wrote My Enemy, My Ally in ELEVEN DAYS?! One of my favorite books ever that was and s

Thanks for the kind words. 😊

And yeah: eleven days. (It might've been longer had my housemates not kindly taken on my snow-shoveling duties for that period. It was snowing a lot in Philly right then.)

This speed of execution (and the luxury of having the leisure to relax into language and dialogue issues) was made possible by having a very detailed outline—a "road map" very completely drawn in advance. ...That having been what sold the novel in the first place.

But then if you're going to work in somebody else's IP, no matter how talented you are (or think you are), you have to be prepared to demonstrate, via outlining, that you know exactly where you're going to be going. Trust me when I tell y'all that at the end of the day, Corporate will have zero interest in how you got stuck mid-story while you were "pantsing it." To work without a sufficiently-detailed outline in somebody else's universe is a near-guaranteed pathway to Only Getting Hired Once.

Meanwhile, more details on how to outline at this level of granularity—or whatever level you need—are here.

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-15 08:26 pm

And relatedly, how the HELL are you handling the seemingly inevitable wrist and arm issues that come

The quick answer: because I too ran into the RSI barrier at an early stage, I've been using speech-to-text tech whenever possible, from when it very first became available in the early 1990s. @petermorwood and I were very early adopters of the first truly reliable STT software, Dragon Dictate (which eventually became Dragon Naturally Speaking).

We got Terry Pratchett hooked up to it, too, and thereby, if indirectly, made it possible for him to finish a book or two (or three...) more than would otherwise have been feasible for him. (Terry's own experts came in and fine-tuned the basic software for T's own needs.)

I've currently got the professional version of Dragon Naturally Speaking installed on my desktop machine, and can sit in my Comfy Chair with my feet up and dictate, watching the words spill out onto the big TV screen in the living room. Or alternately: due to currently being on the road a lot, I'm mostly using the app version of the software, Dragon Anywhere. Dictate to it, when hooked up to broadband, and it types what you're saying as you watch, with 95%-or-better accuracy out of the box. (And the program is endlessly configurable to handle specialized vocabulary, weird alien character names, or whatever.) When you're done, you save the file and the app'll email you a .doc-file transcription of what you just dictated. Cut and paste this into your preferred writing software and—having exuded a chunk of "zero draft" without excessive amounts of wear and tear on your sinews—you can then edit at your leisure.

The app runs on a relatively low-cost monthly subscription model... which makes it handily accessible to folks who can't afford the (unquestionably hefty) price tag on the standalone big-machine install of the full program. I recommend the app highly. You might consider trying it for a month or so and seeing how it works for you. The subscription goes month-to-month, and is easily cancelled if you don't care for it.

Anyway: hope this helps!

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-08 09:30 pm

What Is This Prime Day Shit

Go over here. Get cheap ebooks, direct from the author.

And OWN THEM ALWAYS. Because we’re not funding a space program.

Just stories. :)

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-08 08:25 pm

Since I’ve seen you talk about detailed outlining before, how long would you say it takes you to get

This is (a) a good question, and (b) one of those Almost Impossible To Answer ones, without getting into some detail.

First of all: "A finished outline" of what? Short story? (And yes, you can outine short stories. Sometimes they need it as much as the longer forms. Or even more.) Novella? Novelette? Novel?

...As your question gets into books later on, let's assume you mean a novel.

As is so often the case, my own experience is going to be a crap example for anyone else, as I am generally the Outlier's Outlier.

My first novel gestated in fits and spurts (with fit-and-spurt outlining) for 10+ years before yelling in my ear OKAY, READY NOW! and pulling me under the surface to drown or swim. Six weeks from (finally completed) outline to completed first draft. (That being the one that sold.)

After that I learned how to really outline from my story editors at Hanna-Barbera... because there is no pantsing in TV: your producers have to know what you're turning in, so they can tell the backers/investors. Pretty quickly I learned the art of (as we call it in the household) "weighing the story in your hand," as if it was a bag of sugar. Is there enough story here to sustain a novel? A novella? A short story? That story must shoulder up under the scaffolding you build for it and have enough power to support the weight of the narrative and the characters' interwoven interactions.

You make your call on this, and then you find out—by trial and error—whether you were right or not. Sooner or later you learn whether, and when, to trust your instincts in this regard.

Once you know the number of words you're going to have to work toward... then you can start estimating completion times.

And here is where you learn the hard, bitter business of being honest with yourself. At the end of the day, it comes down to accurate prediction/appraisal of output. How many words are you going to write per week? (I've stopped saying "per day." Too many of the You Must Write X Words Per Day folks have turned this trope toxic, and freaked new writers out.)

But more to the point: can you trust your own estimates?

Let's leave that issue to one side for the moment, and take The Door Into Shadow as an example.

I was just getting to grips with outlining as a necessity at that point (as Deep Wizardry had required something similar). DW was its own set of problems, as the pace of the outlining was being influenced by needing to do real-world research at NYPL (For this was sooooo long before Google, and there was nowhere to get the data I needed except out of books.)

TDISha, though, was another kettle of fish. Beginning and ending were plain enough to me from even the earliest conceptual stages. The middle (as always for me: middles always seem murkiest...) was still up in the air, both structurally and in terms of the intrapersonal relationships that would define it. And the middle had some extremely difficult stuff for the protagoniste to get through. (Disclosure for those who might have heard some whispered stuff about this: in this book, I was working through my own historical sexual assault/abuse at age sixteen by a "friend of the family". Last I heard, adults were still allowed to do this kind of working-through in prose. Got other opinions? I've heard them many times over many years. This approach worked for me.)

Outlining on TDISha took me something like three months. Writing the book took six months, plus/minus... once I was clear that the outline was right on the money and needed to go where it was going. Then I got back to Young Wizards work, and Scooby-Doo. (Or was it Space Ghost by then? I lose track.)

Since then, on every book I've written, outlining has routinely taken six to eight weeks. The books themselves have taken...

...ALL kinds of lengths of time. Outlining of My Enemy, My Ally took about two months. Writing the book (on very short notice, as the publisher suddenly had an empty slot to fill) took eleven days. ("Can you do this?" said the agent over the phone, very concerned. "Are you sure??" I was sure. Because the outline was detailed, even for me, and I knew exactly where I was going.)

Outlining of The Romulan Way, by comparison, took maybe a month, and the book itself took sixteen or eighteen days... because @petermorwood was co-writing. (But he was so intuitive and quick on the uptake that he might as well have been inside my head... and people still have trouble telling which of us wrote what. Which is exactly as it should be, when you're writing as a team. You don't want to be told apart: you're working as a corporate being.)

Yet Tales of the Five: The Librarian, which I'm working on completing at the moment, took maybe a year to outline, and has been drafting since 2019. And many books between now and [twenty? thirty?....) years past, have produced wildly different results that are resistant to any kind of logical analysis.

...I think what I'm getting down to here is that attempts to jam your work-in-progress into a Box of Timing Expectations are possibly futile. All kinds of things will affect your ratio of outlining-to-execution time: life-crisis crap, the annoying intersection of mundane work-and-living needs with creative time, illness, straightforward inability to concentrate on the writing no matter how you try: you name it. It'll just be maddening if you try to force it to make sense. (Especially since so much in this equation rests on how many words you turn out a week. (Month. Whatever. Stop counting it by the day like calories, ffs. Art will not willingly be sliced up to go onto the scale and be weighed by the goddamn gram.)

…My take on this: Stop paying attention to other people's half-baked, self-centered expectations on how fast you should be writing. Do what YOU, and your Work, need to be doing.)

In particular: take the time to do what your story seems to be requiring you to do. And cut it some slack. It may know better than your Conscious Brain does.

More could be said about this, but for the moment, I suspect this is enough. Other people are all too willing to flourish the whip over your sweating, straining Creative Selves' backs and crack it as if your Steeds of Creativity aren't working hard enough to suit their standards.

You know what? Fuck that noise.

"Realistic estimates"? There aren't any. Other people are making them up. They want to make themselves feel right. Whether that makes you feel ineffective is the last thing on their minds. (And work executed from that POV is dreadfully revelatory of their work’s likely quality.)

Work as your own version of the Work desires you to. Write your best at your own best pace.

Those other guys? What have they written lately? Who cares! The hell with them. Go where your own Work takes you, at your (and its!) own speed. Which is the right speed.

And gods' speed. :)

ETA to @rabidbehemoth: Jeez, be SLOW and shame the Devil. Let James Joyce be your poster boy on this! I'm sure he'd have liked to be done with Ulysses sooner, but some things can't be rushed, y'know? :)

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-08 07:24 pm

The fact that people follow you either entirely unaware you’re an author or have that big of cajones

Gods forbid I should pass judgment on anybody's cojones. @petermorwood's were more than enough for me. 😋

As for people not knowing I'm a writer? Last I heard, it wasn't a hanging offense. Let them go their way in peace. They'll figure it out eventually. 😄

(cc’ing @unicultist:) “It has long been truth that celebrity can be detrimental to ones Tumblr career. The already few Tumblr users who admit to celebrity (even niche celebrity) is a population that dwindles by the day.”

(a) Anybody wanna define “celebrity”? Okay, a few million-plus people know who I am, but these days, *that* ain’t much. So, you know, woo woo. (b) WTH is a “Tumblr career”? (Except in the word’s original sense of a long and probably disastrous tumble down a long rocky slope.) (c) “‘What is truth?’” (she said, and washed her hands.) 😏

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-07 11:40 pm
Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-06 09:05 pm

Weekend links, July 6, 2025

cleolinda:

My posts

Guess what? I’m going to be having a chat with my spinal clinic about some side effects from that epidural pain block a couple weeks ago. Thus, we didn’t have a linkspam last Sunday, and I’m working from a larger pool of posts this week. Also, I am behind on everything. Enjoy. 

Side note, Ian’s Silent Hill 2 stream of Toluca Prison (and an hour’s discussion of storytelling with Vic Frederick) went up two Wednesdays ago. (He’s now taking a month off while I pick up the [my] slack.) I made it to chat, despite shaking off anesthesia. And I’m glad I did because the first major fight was… something I’ve never seen before, I’ll put it that way. I now have a new goal for when my videos get there. 

Meanwhile, remember how I posted about horror as comfort media? These people get it.


Reblogs of interest

Pride parade, Budapest, 100k+ people marching: "the perfect example of ‘they can’t arrest all of us’“ 

Niagara Falls lit up in rainbow; a lovely bisexual moon.

Important food recalls and news sources for the United States

How to Disable and Remove All AI Features in Mozilla Firefox. Et tu, Mozilla?

After 40 years of being free Microsoft has added a paywall to Notepad. No, I actually expected that from y'all. With links/recs for Libre Office. 

By the way, Shel Silverstein foresaw gen AI

"i think all quiet on the western front and the lord of the rings are in direct conversation with each other,” with bonus Narnia shell craters. That sounds flippant, but I really think everybody here is onto something. 

Disney Reportedly Planning Full Reboot of the Indiana Jones Franchise, and Bluesky has some ideas

“To be TRULY fluent in English you must know your SHITS”

“i am not immune to the bit. i’m gonna have to go full mingo aren’t i.”

I remember these MTV Video Music Awards Posters from 1999. Yes, the late '90s were exactly Like That.

Putting the CERN back in “concerned," Molly Bair wearing Iris van Herpen inside the CERN Large Hadron Collider. Listen, you know shit ain’t been the same since that weasel. You get out of there right now.

"a redditor has mushrooms growing out of his home’s electrical sockets” and it’s not good. It’s Not Good!

“True Gym Bros while flexing their jaws: Come Bro, join us in the Gainshalla”

Prosper, feather beast

“Call me Cismale”

Go in the wet. The wet will love you. The wet doesn’t have capitalism. Just go in the wet.

“IT WAS NOT THE FUCKING COLONIALISM THAT INVENTED THE FUCKING POTATO.”

Dude’s out here trying to solve House of Leaves. I give it to page 120 before the actual minotaur gets him.” No one has read this book so purely in its own spirit as this one beleaguered guy reading it in French with graph paper and a middle finger.

I am pretty sure I will grab Date Everything if there’s a good discount on Steam

“spn Fandom perfec t fun for put new fan in to e\njoy show! inside very Nice and Comfort new fan enjoy fun put new fan in Spn Fandom.” (I never get my “mouth perfect size for meme” tag right on the first try)

Tag yourself, I’m the Taylor Swift lyric "some guy said my aura’s moonstone, just 'cause he was high"

Art: “The important questions of what if bird were fruit”

“Girl help the pessimists are mistaking an inherently meaningless universe for an inhumane and joyless one rather than recognizing the opportunity to make one’s own meaning and joy and to spread those things to others”

“girl help they’re decoding my cat”

He’s all in

A brooch of a fabulous creature

HONSE


Video

Someday Amaury Guichon is going to release a video where creates a life sized statue of a human being, but as he adds detail, it becomes increasingly clear that the chocolate model is becoming more and more akin to a perfect replica of the viewer”

The painstaking restoration of a wedding dress from 1950

This is not how I expected you’d make magnolia blossom ice cream

“they removed capybara walking (1887) from letterboxd so i’m letting it live on my blog forever”

Knitted sheep, animated

One of the deans at Beijing Dance Academy shows you how it’s done

Pre-Colonial Filipino clothing revivalists out on the town


The sacred texts

Children’s Hospital Colour Theory

Dogs in Elk


Personal tags of the week

I’m going to say food, but it was actually a good bit of #chocolate. Also, Pride Month, since it wrapped up while I was still recovering. 

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-06 09:02 pm

docd666:alanaisalive: throughshadow-to-the-edgeofnight: iguanamouth: alanaisalive: The other...

docd666:

alanaisalive:

throughshadow-to-the-edgeofnight:

iguanamouth:

alanaisalive:

The other night husband and I were watching a documentary about the yeti where they were doing DNA analysis of samples of supposed yeti fur, and every one of them came back as bears.

Anyway, the next night we watched a thing about some pig man who is supposed to live in Vermont. People said it had claws and a pig nose but walked upright like a man. Now, I happen to know that sideshows used to shave bears and present them as pig men. So every piece of evidence they gave of this monster sounds to me like a bear with mange.

So now the running joke in our house is that everything is bears. Aliens? Bears. Loch Ness monster? Bear. Every cryptozoological mystery is just a very crafty bear.

Bears. They’re everywhere. Be wary. Anyone or anything could be a bear.

oh shit

As the OP of this post, I’m going to threaten that if this gets to one million notes by the 10 year anniversary on 1 June 2026, one year from today, I will get a lower back tattoo of the loch ness bear monster.

Y'all know what to do Tumblr.

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-06 03:14 pm

Or just the public library. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and Bulfinch’s Mythology were gat

pleasinglyforeboding:

notanupstandingcitizen:

people who learned about greek mythology due reasons that DONT involve having read percy jackson at 12 freak me out, like what the FUCK was going on in your life that you found out that zeus turned into a pigeon to woo his wife like HOW

Some of us had Xena: Warrior Princess and access to a public library.

Or just the public library. Edith Hamilton’s Mythology and Bulfinch’s Mythology were gateway drugs enough for me. 😄

Diane Duane ([syndicated profile] dduane_feed) wrote2025-07-06 09:24 am

Hi Diane, I just saw your post about your trip with Peter through Interlochen (feat Haben Sie eine g

Hmm… the thought never occurred to me.

…That said, though: I think the time machine will be out of the shop around this time last week. Shouldn’t have to go back much further than 1979 to sort this out. Thanks for the thought.