What are the documents of Tabat? In an early version of the book, I had a number of interstitial pieces, each a document produced by the city: playbills, advertisements, guide book entries. They had to be cut but I kept them for web-use. I hope you enjoy this installment, but you’ll have to read Beasts of Tabat to get the full significance. -Cat
“Arriving in Tabat: A Visitor’s Guide,” being Pamphlet #12 of the second series of A Visitor’s Guide to Tabat, Spinner Press, author unknown.
No traveler notices the same thing about the city of Tabat when they first see it. For one, it may be the sparkle of sunlight on the harbor and the way the great ship’s shadows glide beside them in the water. For another it may be the lines of the Great Tram and its companions, the vast iron baskets that, suspended from cables, carry passengers up and down the city’s terraces. Or the tiles that adorn most of the roof, a vague gray purple or green in color, made from clay from the marshes to the east of the city.
But how you enter the city will affect your view. You may come by ship, from the Old Continent or the Southern Isles, or even farther aboard, and your first view will be the city’s terraces, sloping down to the harbor’s protected bowl.
If you come from the opposite side, traveling down the Northstretch River and arriving at the river docs, you’ll see the terraces from above, marked with the silver lines of the trams and the green stripe of the Heart Garden cutting across them.
A few come on foot across the marshes on Tabat’s eastern edge, but they are haunted by water-horses and crocodiles, and dangerous for any who do not know the tricks of surviving there.
Of late, experiments with demon-powered dirigibles have provided a new vista to the city, although available only to those who hold the Duke’s favor. Who knows what new sights the city will present from that angle?
But no matter how it looks to you, know that you have come to Tabat, the most wonderful city in the world.
***
Love this world and want to spend longer in it? Check out Hearts of Tabat, the latest Tabat novel! Or get sneak peeks, behind the scenes looks, snippets of work in progres, and more via Cat’s Patreon.
Want access to a lively community of writers and readers, free writing classes, co-working sessions, special speakers, weekly writing games, random pictures and MORE for as little as $2? Check out Cat’s Patreon campaign.
Want to get some new fiction? Support my Patreon campaign.
"(On the writing F&SF workshop) Wanted to crow and say thanks: the first story I wrote after taking your class was my very first sale. Coincidence? nah….thanks so much."
~K. Richardson
You may also like...
Speculative Reminiscences: Weekly Recap for 2/9/2014
If you enjoyed "Tortoiseshell Cats Are Not Refundable" and are interested in finding out more about my online classes, click here!There’s plenty of room left in my upcoming online classes.
Self Promotion and Career Building: What I Told the Clarion West 2013 Class
Yesterday I spent a pleasant chunk of time talking to the Clarion West 2013 students, along with Django Wexler. Django and I were the “mystery muses,” a Friday feature for the CW students where people come in to chat about a specific aspect of the writerly life. Django spoke well to the experience of having one’s first major book come out, since his book (which I have read and heartily recommend) The Thousand Names just came out. He let us all know (to mass disappointment) that it doesn’t lead to being booked on the Leno or Daily Show or lavish book tours, though he did get to go to ComicCon.
I decided to talk about self-promotion and career building, since that’s advice I didn’t get a lot of while at Clarion West myself. And I came up with nine maxims, but lost that index card so I have an incomplete list. Maybe the students can chime in to tell me what I’ve forgotten.
Writing always comes first. Self-promotion can become a form of procrastination, particularly if you’re playing on Facebook or Twitter while pretending it’s all in the name of self-promotion. Having the biggest Twitter following in the world won’t help you unless you’ve actually got something to promote.
Be discoverable. One of the questions that always comes up in my Building an Online Presence for Writers class is whether it’s mandatory for a writer to have a social media presence and blog and all that. The answer is no, (though it’s helpful in these days, when the burden of promotion falls increasingly on the writer him or herself.) But you do need a way for someone to find you if they liked a story and want to contact you. That may be a simple static webpage where you maintain a list of your publications. It may be a full blown blog. Or it might be a social media presence (although I think this approach is not the best, because people may not be on Twitter or Tumblr or Facebook or whatever network you’ve chosen).
Don’t oversell. We’ve all unfriended or stopped following people because of the unrelenting way they push their books. Out of five Tweets (or blog posts, or FB posts, or whatever), only one should be about selling stuff. The others can be kitten pictures, advice, funny sayings, whatever (one easy way to fill this quota is to promote other people), but make it something that people are interested in.
Don’t be a jackass. It’s a small world and word gets around when you behave badly. Search on “authors behaving badly” if you want some examples. Professionality is important, although sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of in our charming, silly, opinionated genre. Don’t make arguing on the Internet another form of procrastination.
Jealousy is okay. We all experience it. Use it as motivation for writing. Don’t put it on the Internet. Find one person you can trust and use them as your sounding board when you absolutely have to say those snarky things about an award or kudos bestowed unjustly.
Say thanks. When someone does something kind like getting you invited to an anthology, blurbing your book, whatever, don’t assume it’s your due because you’re a genius. We all think we’re geniuses. SF is full of people paying it forward, but they’re more likely to do so for gracious people.
Be kind to yourself. Writers are so good at beating ourselves up, at feeling guilty for not doing X or achieving Y. Don’t do that. Set goals but rather than punishing yourself for not meeting them, reward yourself when you do hit that word count. You are the person with the most to gain from being kind to you, so do at least one nice thing for yourself each day, whether it’s taking time for some activity you enjoy or giving yourself some small present.
Don’t be a jackass. It’s a point worth repeating.
Some other things that got mentioned:
Find someone who is where you want to be a few years down the line and look to see what they’re doing, using their example to guide your actions.
Early on, you don’t need to go to conventions unless they’re something you enjoy for their own sake. If you do go, participate. If you can’t be on panels, try volunteering, which is a great way to meet people and network.
Writing process differs from person to person. Try different strategies and when you find something that works for you, do it, do it, do it.
For most of us, it’s easier to write if you get at least a few words in each day.
It is often skill in rewriting that differentiates the professional-level writer from the almost-but-not-quite-there.
And here’s something I didn’t mention, but which has come up a lot recently, as to what to blog about, both in terms of finding something interesting and not spending too much time on it: excerpts of what you’re working on both fulfills those terms and encourages you to get some words out.
Prefer to opt for weekly interaction, advice, opportunities to ask questions, and access to the Chez Rambo Discord community and critique group? Check out Cat’s Patreon. Or sample her writing here.
One Response
Cat Rambo: Documents of Tabat: Arriving in Tabat http://t.co/iIfCP9cM9x