Archive for August, 2008

• French Graphic Novel of Farseer from Soleil (Finalized cover)

  Date: 2008.08.22 | Category: News | Response: 0

    

  So, here it is at last!  The finalized cover for L’Assasin Royal!  Enjoy!

  In other notes, I really enjoyed the last Write Here, Right Now at A Renaissance Cafe.  Ben was fascinating as always, and the more I talk to Chris, the more I enjoy him.  

  I’m trying to put together a meetup with the Readergirlz Divas of Tacoma, or at lease some of them.  I’d also like to set up a kid-friendly get together so writers who are also parents can come and talk writing and the kids can have a fun time, too.  Both of those are down the road a bit.  September is around the corner and a very busy month indeed!

  Robin

• Right here, Write Now!

  Date: 2008.08.16 | Category: News | Response: 0

    A Renaissance Cafe, at 1746 Pacific Ave, Tacoma Washington.  Right down the street from the University Book Store in downtown Tacoma.  1 PM  Tomorrow, Sunday, August 17.  Bring your work in progress if you have one, or come join us to take a break from your writing tasks.

  Drink coffee. Eat if you feel like it. Enjoy the really cool art on display in this cafe.  Talk about writing with other Tacoma writers.

  Be inspired.

  Robin

  One day Molly will drive all the way up from Oregon and join us!

• French Graphic Novel

  Date: 2008.08.13 | Category: News | Response: 2

  A few days ago, I received the finalized image of the cover for L’Assassin Royal.  This is the French graphic novel of The Farseers.  I am hoping it will be available by September.  It’s possible that US readers will be able to order it from Amazon.co.fr.    It will be published by Soleil, and is the brilliant  work of Laurent Sieurac and Jean-Charles Gaudin.  I’ve seen  proofs of some of the pages, and I will be tremendously excited to see the finished work. 

  The cover art is the work of Didier Graffet.  I’ve made a couple of attempts to upload the cover itself to LJ, but neither has been successful. So I shall refer the curious to the cover art album on the Robin Hobb photobucket.  

  The first question I’m usually asked about this is, “Are there plans for an English language version?”  I’m sad to say that, for right now, the answer is ‘no’.  But even with my execrable French, I’ve found the illustrated story very easy to follow.  

  I was already looking forward to Utopiales in Nantes, France at the end of October.  Knowing that I’ll have the opportunity to finally meet Laurent and Jean-Charles is just the frosting on the cake!

• repeat from the newsgroup

  Date: 2008.08.10 | Category: News | Response: 3

  This was actually written in response to post #38275 on the Robinhobb newsgroup at sff.net. Mark asked some excellent questions about the Farseer books in relation to the Soldier Son books. I found myself writing a much longer response than I usually did and going into detail on an area that I’ve avoided up to now. So I think I’ll put it up here as well.

  You draw some interesting parallells between the trilogies. My first impulse was to dismiss them (No connection at all!) But as often happens, readers may see more clearly than the writer when common themes are touched upon in different books.

  When I first wrote Farseer, at the end of Assassin’s Quest, I firmly believed that I was finished with Fitz. Some people found the ending sad or even tragic.
  My personal feeling was that he had fulfilled his role as a hero, which demanded a certain, oh very well, ah, a high level of sacrifice. Because of my own personality, I saw the final scenes of him as peaceful and fulfilling. There he was, in the solitude he’d always craved, with his wolf. (It was definitely a happy ending for Nighteyes!)

  It was over a year later that I began to feel twitches of writing more about Fitz. I don’t think I was trying to ‘fix’ the ending so much as that I’d realized the releasing of dragons would have a definite effect on things up in the Six Duchies. I knew where I was going with Liveship Traders. And I’d begun to have the feeling that there was more to Fitz’s story. A rough chapter or three convinced me I was right. But I set them aside to finish writing Liveships.

  With Nevare, the ending was fairly clear to me from the beginning. As I’ve commented before, I think the most reasonable place to end a book is where the next story would begin. So, although on the surfae it looks as if Nevare has a ‘happily ever after’ there, I personally could see a lot of complications for what he had ahead of it. But it was a good place to say, ‘but this part of his life is now told.’ For me, it’s a satisfactory ending.

  I think I will go ahead and admit that when I wrote Fool’s Fate, I thought that I would be returning to Fitz’s story. A few astute readers have written ‘Aha!’ letters to me about the line toward the end of the book where I spoke of how a minstrel may pause before he sweeps into the final chorus. And that was my intent, at the time. Fitz and Co. had exhausted me. I wanted to do something different for a time and give my own emotions a bit of recovery time. Because writing about Fitz and Co is emotionally draining for me. They are very intense tales to tell. I wanted to build up a head of steam again before going back to that world.

  I have not, however, gone back to that world. I hope the following does not sound like a whine; I am sure there will be some who interpret it that way, but if I talk about this, then I guess I’ll just have to deal with that.

  I received a LOT of negative feedback about the ending. Letters were sent to me and public posts were made saying that I had ‘copped out’ or ‘chickened out’.
  Many of the letters and posts and yes, a lot of the fan fiction up on various sites tries to dictate that the story goes a certain way, i.e. that Fitz and the Fool run off together and live happily ever after.

  To those who believe the Fool is male, having Fitz suddenly surrender his heterosexual preference doesn’t seem to matter. If I wrote a gay character and then had him convert to being straight so that some readers could enjoy a ‘happily ever after’ scenario, I think people would accuse me of having an agenda. After all, don’t we all believe that the ‘right’ girl could make a gay fellow go straight?
  Of course we do! (Oh, and before someone happily quotes that sentence somewhere, please know that is a Sarcasm.) Yet going the other direction seems just fine to many readers who will bend, spindle and mutilate Fitz any way they need to in order to reach the ending they desire. I don’t understand that. I like him the way he is. Such a radical change doesn’t seem feasible to me. In fact, I’ll put that as a question to the heterosexual male readers here; how much would you have to love your friend to want to have sexual relations with him if he, too, were male? Think of your very best friend, your long term, since-elementary-school buddy and let me know if he fills you with lust when you think of him. Do you want to leave your girlfriend/wife and run off with him? Inquiring minds want to know. How likely is that scenario?

  Now, if you talk to some people who believe the Fool is female, it all seems very simple to some of them. The Fool simply says, ‘by the way, I’m a girl’ and Fitz tosses Molly aside and takes up with the Fool. Now, knowing Fitz as I do, I don’t find that a likely scenario either. For all of his life, Molly and the stability of a home life is what he has clearly wanted. He loves Molly.
  Neither of them are perfect people. But they do love one another, warts and all. So for me, as an author, to make him suddenly discard her and run off to follow the Fool (not to mention leaving his responsibilities in the Six Duchies)seems like it would put a real torque on a character I’ve spent years constructing.

  Now why would I do that?

  Irony point. At the end of Assassin’s Quest, I received a lot of feedback at the editorial stage and later from readers that Fitz should have gone home, married Molly, and somehow become King and lived happily ever after. That ending never felt right to me. Because my editors allowed me to have the ending I’d first visualized, the second part of Fitz’s story unfolded in a way that I felt was far more powerful and compelling than if I’d given in to the ‘color by numbers’ ending that was suggested.

  I really wish that, at the end of Fool’s Fate, some of the more vocal readers had trusted me to know what I was doing as a story teller.

  Anyway. The negative letters and reactions were very disheartening. The fan fiction I looked at (yes, I know I shouldn’t have looked deep discouragement can make a person do some self-destructive things) convinced me that some readers had completely missed what I was writing about. That was downright depressing, in every sense of that word. In some ways, I felt like a good part of the readership didn’t really want to know what I had envisioned for these characters. They weren’t interested in the things I was saying about friendship and love and identity and gender. Sometimes it seemed that they just wanted a book that ended with a torridly romantic sex scene. For a time, I felt that if I wrote the concluding books that I’d visualized, people simply would not accept them, just as they’d balked at the ends of Assassin’s Quest and Fool’s Fate.

  And so I set the notes and ideas aside as not being compelling enough to sustain a readership facing a book very different from what they’d envisioned. Given a choice between writing books that ended falsely and writing books that many readers would feel ‘cheated’ them, I opted out of writing them at all. I decided I would not return to the Six Duchies unless I had a story that readers would find truly compelling. The conclusion I had visualized was, I thought, probably not it. Sometimes I took the ideas out and looked at them, but every time I put them away again.

  In France, on a day when I was not feeling well during Imaginales, I skipped dinner one evening and spent 6 or 8 hours going over the ideas again. (France is a wonderful place for me. It’s one place where the readers I’ve encountered are very supportive of me as an ‘artist’ with a vision. Every time I’ve visited there, I’ve come away recharged.) Anyway, I wondered if using a different narrator so that readers saw the events from an outside perspective would make my story acceptable. I toyed with the ideas again, I put down some notes, and in my mind I roughed out the first two chapters. And then I came home and set them aside and went back to work on my current projects. Because I still have my doubts. Some of the readership obviously has doubts that I knew where I was going with this story. Their feedback was like being interrupted by someone ju
  st as you get to the climax of a joke or story. (You know what I mean. Someone jumps up and goes, “Oh, I know how that one ends!” And then they blow the punchline by saying it the wrong way.And all you can do is walk away, because delivering the final line at that point is just lame.)

  Even some of the editorial feedback I’ve received has been along the lines of ‘give them what they want.’ Unfortunately for all of us, I simply can’t write that way. I can’t force out an ending that seems illogical or untrue to the characters. I’ve tried writing ‘to order’ before. You know what happens to me? The characters simply sit down on the page and start playing 5 card stud and wait for me to start listening to them again. I can’t force Fitz or Fool into one of those sappy contrived endings. They just aren’t going there. And neither am I.

  I’ve contracted for other books all the way through 2011. So I have plenty of time to ponder the wisdom of returning to Fitz’s voice and tale.

  And all of that is a very roundabout way of saying that the end of Fool’s Fate wasn’t supposed to be the final ending of that tale. So, it doesn’t really reflect my philosophy on life.

  As for dealing with loss in stories. I strongly feel that until people face a loss and deal with it, they cannot fully live their lives. I’m at a stage in my life now where, in my 50’s, a lot of my friends are finally facing and dealing with earlier blows. They’re talking about things that they’ve always blamed on other people, and finally taking some of the responsibility for them.
  Divorces. Children that they left behind. Adventures they didn’t go on. Or peace that they squandered in search of adventure. Smoking too much dope. Never smoking dope. Everyone has regrets of some kind. Every choice you make in life shuts down an infinite number of other possiblities.

  I’m seeing some friends now who have turned, faced their losses and regrets, evaluated and incorporated them into their lives, and moved on. They’ve become wise. (That isn’t a sarcasm.) In each of those books you mentioned, my heroes turned and faced losses they had endured. They recognized that one cannot make all choices. And they became better people. In some ways they were more whole for admitting what they had left behind.

  Each time we make a choice, we leave a bit of ourselves behind. I never became a journalist and traveled to the hot spots in the world to report on them. I regret that. That part of myself never came to be. But I did other things and they were just as rich in a different way.

  Wow. This is a really long post. And it’s 9:37 here and I still need to get my words done. I’m daring myself to post this. It talks about topics I’ve avoided and tap-danced around for a long time.

  Once I press ‘post’ I may very well regret this.

  RH

• Summer Rain

  Date: 2008.08.09 | Category: News | Response: 0

  It’s raining here.

  Seems like we used to get a lot more summer rain here in the Pacific North West than we do now. I’m not a hot weather person, so I enjoy it when the clouds move in, the temperatures drop into the pleasant seventies and then the rain comes down. I’m a little concerned it may knock a lot of the fruit off the plum trees, but the raccoons have been working on that task anyway. It’s a daily race to get the ripe plums before they do.

  Haven’t had the best week ever. Began it when I accidentally left my vehicle unlocked. The next morning, it was obvious someone had entered it and gone through every item inside it looking for valuables. Well, I don’t leave anything valuable in the van, so that was no problem. They did steal my registrationa and insurance card; I think they thought it was an envelope for cash or something. It was a pain in the neck to get those replaced, but I still thought I’d got off easy.

  Then, night before last, thieves hit our neighborhood again. They came into the yard and stole two of our bicycles. Luckily, they left the children’s bikes. What they got was a 15 year old Schwinn that I used, and my spouse’s 15 year old street bike. And our helmets. I suppose it’s a sign of the time when old street bikes are worth stealing.

  Tacoma has more than its fair share of theft of these kinds. In some ways, we’re a troubled city. Our part of the NW seems to create and export serial killers: The Green River Killer, the Beltway Sniper, Ted Bundy— those are just off the top of my head. We get more than our share of sexual predators here, and car theft in rampant. One of our deputy prosecutors wrote a book, fictional but based on Tacoma, called Methlehem. We have a serious drug problem in our area. So I’ve had a number of people ask me why we still live in this city.

  The truth is, that’s not the Tacoma I know. I get burned by that other Tacoma sometimes, in the form of a stolen bike or a car broken into. But for the most part, my Tacoma is a city on Puget Sound, with easy access to beaches and mountains. It’s a tough little blue collar town in some ways, one of the busiest ports on the West Coast of the US, with trade ties to all sorts of Pacific Rim nations and cities. And there’s an incredible amount of artistic creativity here.

  A lot of the creative people in my city are what I call blue collar artists. They work all day at a wide range of jobs and create in their spare time. Art of all media, poetry, music and writing comes out of this little town. Not too many of our artists will rise to national or even state-wide prominance, but I love their local take on beauty. Sometimes those who do achieve fame and fortune return here and put a great deal back into our community. Thanks to the influence of home boy Dale Chihuly, Tacoma has a lively glass arts community. Lamda Award Winning novelist Brent Hartinger (Geography Club)is a local writer who also puts time into fighting censorship of children’s books and mentoring young writers. I think Tacoma breeds some very tough artists.

  It pleases me no end to go into a local coffee shop or bookstore and see the works of local artists on the walls. I like our public art, and our SOTA, that’s our School of the Arts, an arts high school that exists in the heart of downtown and meets in several locations. I like to go downtown to one of the local coffeeshops and watch the kids hurrying past to get to their next classes or stealing a moment of time for a quick cup of coffee. I love looking at them and wondering where they will be five, ten, twenty years from now. There is so much raw promise there, so many dreams. I watch those kids and I feel like I live in one of the richest cities in the world. And it’s not just the kids from SOTA that are out there writing and painting and dancing. So many of our young artists are just out there doing it on their own, jumping into creativity and learning to swim in its swift currents.

  I’m glad I live here. Seattle is nice, and so is Olympia, but Tacoma is my town, rain, bike thieves and all.

• That moment in writing the book

  Date: 2008.08.03 | Category: News | Response: 0

  I hit it today. Oddly enough, it came after taking a full day off from writing. Or perhaps, not oddly at all.

  It puts me in mind of an old story about a traveler and his baggage carriers. Wish I could remember the exact tale. But basically, the traveler was in a hurry and pushed on day after day after day, until one day when he arose and prepared to travel for the day, he found all his baggage carriers sitting in a circle, refusing to move. When he asked what the problem was, they told him, “We have journeyed too fast and now we are waiting for our souls to catch up with us.”

  I’ve been pushing on this book steadily, minimum of 1000 words a day. It’s coming along well, the characters are unfolding, the adventure is progressing, the plot thickens, the mystery deepens, and the page count grows. All is going well.

  But there is a difference between competent, workmanline construction of a book, and that tingle when the book takes off. You know that feeling you get when you’re reading a really great story and you have to put it down to go to work or school or whatever. But all day long, you know that world and that adventure is waiting for you, and you can’t wait to get back and find out what happens?

  Well, when the writing switches on, that same feeling hits me. I can’t wait to get back to writing the book so I can find out what happens next. I know what the rough outline says, but that is just a skeleton. It’s when the flesh goes on (and experience has taught me that it takes a certain word count to get there) that suddenly the story sits up, puts on its hat and says, “Come on, follow me, and please do try to keep up.”

  So. That hit me today. I know a key thing about Thymara that I knew but didn’t fully realize before. And knowing that tells me a very important thing about Alise.

  That was the Aha! moment.

  And I was very glad to have it happen.