I went through the first few weeks of Holly Lisle’s How To Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers working on short story projects, but I’ve decided to go back to the beginning of the material and start working out my novel project. It’s something I’ve had an inkling of for a long time but never really put to paper, with characters salvaged from a NaNoWriMo project that sank, not quite as dramatically as the Titanic (but maybe not too far off).

So I’ve got my initial idea written down in the form of a few words meant to draw the images in my head back to the surface whenever I look at them. I’ve got The Sentence (something like a 30-word pitch). From these scant thirty words I can already see that my heroine is passive and needs something to drive her. I also need to figure out what sets her apart from other people, the reason the story is about her. I’m tempted to make her love interest the main character instead, but I’m going to resist for now. She just needs a little work.

This new project is codenamed Verdegris, after The Green Knight.

Shards of Honor is the first of two books collected in Cordelia’s Honor. This being my first Bujold, I’d heard a lot of good things but didn’t really know what to expect. (This was also my first time reading Space Opera, or any SF for that matter.)

Captain Cordelia Naismith of Beta Colony is head of an Expeditionary Force on a small, ecologically diverse planet when her survey party is attacked by soldiers from Barrayar, an enemy empire steeped in political intrigue and tradition. When her botanist Ensign Dubauer is wounded and they are both taken captive, to survive she must depend on the mercies of her captor, Commander Aral Vorkosigan, the Butcher of Komarr.

Bujold’s first novel in the Vorkosigan Saga is not normally recommended for a first foray into the series; it’s said the book isn’t up to the quality of the later novels and contains some “romance cliches”. I’m rather religious about reading things in publication order whenever possible, though, so I read it first anyway. I’m not sorry I did.

The book does have some slow passages in which a lot of names are bandied about, Vorkosigan getting Cordelia up-to-speed on the internal politics of Barrayar, which are complicated indeed. Staying awake through those passages rewards the reader, but one does wonder at the time if it’s ever going to matter or mean anything. There are probably ways it could have been handled better. That aside, there are a lot of great things about Shards of Honor, most especially the characters. Bujold makes Vorkosigan very human without resorting to the overblown angst that authors use so often to make characters “human”. He is not too physically perfect, but something about him is attractive, a certain quality that’s hard to put one’s finger on. It has something to do with his honor, I think, an important theme in the book. It’s not so much because his honor is entirely above reproach (which wouldn’t make him very interesting), but more that he places such a high value on it.

Cordelia herself is a woman of honor, and as Vorkosigan says, she bestows it on others around her through her behavior and deeds. But lest I make them sound like bores, I should mention that Shards of Honor is written with unpretentious wit, and Bujold has a way of describing a character in just a few words that provides a mental picture more vivid than many authors can conjure up. About Cordelia’s first encounter with Sergeant Bothari she says,

The top of her head was level with his shoulders, and his face reminded her of an overbred borzoi, narrow, hook-nosed, with his eyes too close together.

Though this is Space Opera and there is some action, the dialogue carries the story. Cordelia and Vorkosigan have an instant rapport and the shift of their relationship from captor and captive to tentative mutual admirers feels natural and never forced. I’m eager to see what happens to Lord Vorkosigan and his Lady in the second book included in Cordelia’s Honor, Barrayar, the follow-up story to Shards of Honor published years later (and winner of a Hugo).

I don’t know how long the layout was screwed up (and don’t tell me, I don’t want to know), but it’s fixed now. I’ve never been able to figure out why, but this theme likes to reset itself to the default stylesheet every so often, and it did this while I wasn’t looking. That’ll teach me.

I’ve had a few things going on in my personal life, but in my writing/reading life a few things have happened as well. Namely, I’ve started Holly Lisle’s six-month online course, How to Think Sideways: Career Survival School For Writers. I’ve been working through the material for a month-and-a-half now, and I’m amazed at how much I’ve learned. Holly gets you to address all the internal stuff (some of it not too pretty) that keeps you from your writing goals, and I feel like I’ve already grown as a writer in this short time.

I’ve also joined the Mythopoeic Society which is a long-time goal of mine. So far I haven’t been able to get involved as much as I’d like, but it’s been fun getting MythPrint, the society newsletter. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a subscription to the journal before long. Plus, I have a little membership card, and that rules! :D

I’m making an effort to balance my time a little better, to work on more things each day instead of over-focusing on just one major project at a time. This goes for writing as well as my daily life. I’ve been sort of thrown off course this week by something fairly major, but I’m looking forward to getting some stuff done in September.