Category Archives: writing

Lost in Translation

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I just sent off Butterfly Swords for Mandarin language verification. My editor asked me whether I thought I would need it and all the sudden I had visions of bad translations like “All your base are belong to us!”. Oh geez. Yes, I’d rather pay extra for peace of mind.

I can see why many authors just go the pure fantasy route, but for me, I think it’s harder to make up Chinese sounding names and all the history. Crossing my fingers that there are no elephant-sized mistakes. I can live with being challenged on little details. It’s fiction. I made it up. *bites nails*

I’ve been having that thought a lot lately. The “oh crap, this is going to be for real”. Sometimes it’s little things, do I want this to be so and so’s name. Other times it’s fact checking. The worst feeling is wanting to read over every line again and line edit, but I’m forcing myself to only stick to requested changes. The book is the book. It’s not perfect, but I need to let go.

I like author Barry Hughart’s term “An Ancient China That Never Was”. I like it so much I wish I had thought of it. 🙂

I'm researching, honest!

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I just had a breakthrough. I realized why I’m stuck in my current WIP. I had all this research about the Tang capital of Changan, but once I left the city, the geography becomes vague. As a result, two of my books became plagued with what I’ll call “stuck in the forest” syndrome.  The characters travel through nebulous trees and mountains and rivers until they emerge in the inhabited world.

I’ll blame the wuxia trope for part of it. A huge component of those stories were travel. Technically, the fictional world where all those stories take place is Jianghu which simply means “rivers and lakes”. If you think of Tolkien’s Middle Earth as the characters traipse through Hobbiton and all the surrounding lands on their way to Mordor, that’s sort of what Jianghu is. And, with all due respect, Tolkien had a bit of “stuck in the forest” syndrome too. 🙂

So early on as a writer, I was criticized for becoming bogged down in description. As a result, I started glossing over details to skip to external action. But then, I was always given a lot of positive feedback for description.  I think I learned something in the course of writing the subsequent books. I learned how to move my characters through Jianghu, through places and settings that were important.  But now I’m back here, back at Book #1 and I realize I’ve got to get these characters out of the forest because Jianghu has more interesting adventures to offer them.

So I’m researching, honest! And not ummm…wasting time on the Internet when I should be writing.

Here’s a quick tour through some ancient sites. It’s amazing what they do with digital animation. *sigh*

Jianghu