And now, a wonderful guest post by Aliette de Bodard, which serves as a good reminder that we are best when we know our process — and when we know that our process is an ever-shifting chimera, as is every book, as is every writer. Yes, we’re literally chimeras. Shut up and go with it, and now read this very good guest post please and thank you.

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I’m not a writer given to much revision.

That makes me sound like everything that comes out of my keyboard is perfect, which is *so* not the case! Rather, what happens is that I do a lot of preparatory work for a piece: I’m the antithesis of a discovery writer, and about 50% of my writing time on a draft is spent researching, brainstorming and outlining so that by the time I get around to writing line one of chapter one I’m usually pretty definite on what exactly is going to happen and when.

Accordingly, it was a bit of a shock when I wrote In The Vanishers’ Palace, my latest book. Originally I set out to write this because I was pretty close to burnout and I wanted to write something just for fun. I’ve always loved Beauty and the Beast, and I wanted to try my hand at a retelling where they’d both be women, and the Beast would be a Vietnamese dragon: something that would merge my love of fantasy and the Vietnamese tales of my childhood, where dragons are water spirits bringing good luck, and the heroes are scholars rather than sword-wielding knights.

Obviously, as I should have known, “fun” became a synonym for “pulling hairs when writing” and “wanting to set fire to everything”. It sounded like a simple idea to rewrite a fairytale–but by the time the first draft was done and I got the first reader feedback it was obvious that my retelling was not working on a major scale. Character motivation and arc was all over the place, and more importantly the plot itself fizzled out, a sure sign that id need to redo the entire thing.

It was a terrifying thought, a bit like jumping out of a plane without a parachute (not helped by the other looming deadlines on other projects and the general fatigue due to being the primary caretaker of two young children in addition to a day job and writing!) In retrospect it’s due to making a couple of ambitious decisions, one of which was having a romance subplot (the Beauty and the Beast part, in which my impoverished scholar falls in love with the dragon whom she’s indentured to) at the same time as a motherhood subplot (the dragon has two adopted children who are now teenagers, and quite busy asserting their independence in the most disastrous possible way). These two plots are not incompatible, obviously, but my brain, fed by tons of media representation, kept insisting it was a terrible mistake.

I looked at my field of ashes draft and thought I might as well toss it in the bin: usually I manage to salvage scenes but this felt like no single scene was working properly.

I moped for a couple of weeks (a totally writer thing to do! Well, at least this writer!) And then I sat down, turned to a fresh page in my brainstorming notebook, and wrote, very deliberately, “list of current scenes in the draft”, and “list of scenes I would like in new draft” (ok, it might have been a teensy bit more cryptic since they were notes to myself). I also took another notebook and did pages of brain dumps that were essentially me talking to myself about what I needed to fix. Writing it down without judgement was actually super helpful to unlock the issues and possible fixes: since it was longhand and not on a computer, I didn’t feel like it was a final story or even graven in stone. It forced me to keep thinking, to keep track of what I was doing, but not in a way that paralyzed me.

By the time I was done, I had a completely new synopsis for a book that only vaguely resembled the original one. I set to writing it, duly–and was surprised that while I couldn’t recycle whole scenes, I could totally plunder my draft for bits and pieces. An abortive, intimate scene around a basket of fruit (because apparently nothing says flirting like giving a basket of fruit to ones’ beloved!) couldn’t be re-used, per se, but I kept the basket of fruit and moved it to earlier in the narration. A scene where my character breaks into a secret hospital room and which completely fizzled out in the original was replaced by a scene in which my scholar character goes looking for the dragon’s children and finds them in the room: I ended up re-using the setting!

From other scenes, I cut and pasted bits, sometimes no longer than sentences–and all of it actually made the subsequent draft faster to write, because there were a bunch of small things and small details I didn’t need to fumble for, but could lift wholesale out of my previous draft.

Basically, I took a knife to my previous draft and used the fragments of its corpse to make the next draft–which is either very sophisticated cooking or advanced draft cannibalism. I wouldn’t say the revision was fun (funnier than first draft, but that’s mostly a comparison between being cut by a sword and being bitten by a dog), but it was certainly way more painless than I expected.

So, my three lessons learnt:

1. In case of doubt, take the book apart
2. Books always involve pulling out hair
3. Draft cannibalism is always a thing

(I did learn a fourth one, which is that I’m totally incapable of making a draft shorter. The final version of In the Vanishers’ Palace is almost double the size of the original one. So much for my plans to write short!(*))

(*)I always write long, and any of my friends could have told me writing a short book with complex characters, complex worldbuilding and two subplots in addition to the main one was DOOMED TO FAIL.

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From the award-winning author of the Dominion of the Fallen series comes a dark retelling of Beauty and the Beast.

In a ruined, devastated world, where the earth is poisoned and beings of nightmares roam the land… 

A woman, betrayed, terrified, sold into indenture to pay her village’s debts and struggling to survive in a spirit world.

A dragon, among the last of her kind, cold and aloof but desperately trying to make a difference.

When failed scholar Yên is sold to Vu Côn, one of the last dragons walking the earth, she expects to be tortured or killed for Vu Côn’s amusement.

But Vu Côn, it turns out, has a use for Yên: she needs a scholar to tutor her two unruly children. She takes Yên back to her home, a vast, vertiginous palace-prison where every door can lead to death. Vu Côn seems stern and unbending, but as the days pass Yên comes to see her kinder and caring side. She finds herself dangerously attracted to the dragon who is her master and jailer. In the end, Yên will have to decide where her own happiness lies—and whether it will survive the revelation of Vu Côn’s dark, unspeakable secrets…

Aliette de Bodard: Website

In The Vanishers’ Palace: Indiebound | Amazon

Psst. Time to give your eyes and brain to Myke Cole, who wrote a book of — *checks notes* — actual history, because Myke is bad-ass that way. He’s also a nerd in the best way possible, and so here he’s humbly asking you to give his historical nerdery a shot. And, knowing Myke’s writing, I think you oughta listen to him.

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Hey Science Fiction and Fantasy (SF/F) fans. Thanks for giving me your eyes for a minute.

I ‘m here to ask for your help.

You see, I wrote this book. It’s called LEGION VERSUS PHALANX, and it’s my first work of non-fiction.

Bear with me for a minute while I lay this out. A couple of years back I rediscovered my love of wargaming. I found myself refighting battles between the Roman legion and the “Greek” phalanx. It was this super cool “who would win a fight?” thing. You’ve got the Roman legionaries with their short swords, and the Greeks with their 21-foot pikes. Different armor. Different fighting styles. Different commanders. Batman vs. Superman. X-Wing vs. TIE fighter. You get the idea.

I thought. “This is awesome! I’m going to go read a book on legion versus phalanx battles and get smart on it!”

And off I went to Barnes & Noble.

And . . . well, there wasn’t one. Yeah, I was shocked too. It seemed so damn obvious. But after a few days of searching, I had to accept defeat. Nobody had written a book deep-diving on how the legion fought the phalanx, who won, and why.

Well, this is me we’re talking about. Suffice to say that about a year later there now *was* a book on legion versus phalanx battles.

But I had one small problem: I had to sell it.

My agent has a saying, “I sell one of two things – your manuscript or your reputation. The more you have of one, the less you need of the other.” When it comes to fantasy books, I have a little bit of a reputation.

But when it comes to *history*, to *nonfiction*, I have ZERO reputation. In fact, when I brought the book to my agent, he almost wouldn’t take it out. “Look, Myke,” he said after reading it, “this is a great book. But you have to understand that to sell a book like this, you have to have a Ph.D., be a professor. Nobody is going to buy it no matter how good it is.”

But, he took it out anyway, and as the rejections rolled in, I began to get the sinking feeling he was right.

In the end, fortune smiled on me. Osprey, the world’s leading publisher of military history (and my hands down favorite nonfiction publisher) picked me up.

Good news, right? Maybe.

You see, to get the deal, I made them a promise.

In my proposal, I told them that the fantasy and science fiction audience *loves* history, and in particular military history. I told them that SF/F geeks are gamers, miniature painters, the type of readers who obsess over weapons and tactics, who thrill to the kind of dramatic tension inherent in battle-narratives. “They’ll cross over,” I said, “publish this book, let me tell the story in a pop, non-scholarly voice, and I will bring you SF/F fans. They will buy this book. They will LOVE this book.”

See, I don’t come from the scholarly community. I come from *this* community – the geek tribe of SF/F fandom. THIS is what I know, all of you. So I am stepping out on a limb in publishing LEGION VERSUS PHALANX.

And I am betting that you’re going to step out on it with me.

I believe in this book. The story of how these units fought is *amazing.* I paid special attention to the drama in each battle, highlighting the personalities of the generals – the passionate, mercurial Pyrrhus of Epirus, the egotistical and fastidious Lucius Aemilius Paullus. Each of the six battles I cover in the book was near-run thing, selected for the fact that the fight was *close*, that it could have gone either way. I tell the story with my novelist’s eye toward a story arc. If I did my job right (and I think I did), you will get caught up in the story every bit as much as you would a work of fiction.

The fantasy novels you love all extrapolate from history. The court intrigues and vicious civil war of Game of Thrones is rooted in the real life Wars of the Roses. Tolkien’s Middle Earth lives and breathes for us because Tolkien built it from the historical and mythological bones of a world that did live and breath – the craggy mountains and dark forests of early medieval Europe. Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series rises high in the fantasy firmament . . . borne on the shoulders of the very real history of the Napoleonic Wars. The Paladins I always play on the rare occasions I actually get to sit down to the D&D table are based on the legendary champions at the court of the real-life Frankish emperor Charlemagne. The list goes on and on and on.

Fantasy resonates and transports because it is inspired by, and extrapolates from, the history of the real world.

After eight fantasy books, I’ve decided to cut to the chase and go right to the well-spring of that inspiration, and I’ve bet my publisher that you’ll come along for the ride.

So here I am, hat in hand, asking you to prove me right. Thanks.

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From the time of Ancient Sumeria, the heavy infantry phalanx dominated the battlefield. Armed with spears or pikes, standing shoulder to shoulder, and with overlapping shields, they presented an impenetrable wall of wood and metal to the enemy. It was the phalanx that allowed Greece to become the dominant power in the Western world. That is, until the Romans developed the legion and cracked the phalanx.

In Legion versus Phalanx Cole weighs the two fighting forces against each other. Covering the period in which the legion and phalanx clashed (280–168 BC), he looks at each formation in detail–delving into their tactics, arms, and equipment, organization and the deployment. It then examines six key battles in which legion battled phalanx: Heraclea (280 BC), Asculum (279 BC), Beneventum (275 BC), Cynoscephalae (197 BC), Magnesia (190 BC), and Pydna (168 BC)–battles that determined the fate of the ancient world. Drawing on original primary sources, Myke Cole presents a highly detailed but lively history of this defining clash of military formations.

Myke Cole: Website | Twitter

Legion Versus Phalanx: Indiebound | Amazon | B&N | Powells