Author Archives: marina.berlin.contact

A book is finished.

Last night (technically, this morning) I finished writing my book.

This is a statement that’s far less dramatic than it may at first appear – since I wrote the book hoping it would be traditionally published, me arriving at a draft that I consider “final” doesn’t really mean much.

Now comes the stage of sending the book to agents, waiting, hoping and praying one of them might want to represent my work, then, if I’m very lucky, the book would be submitted to publishers, then, if I’m even luckier, I would get to revise it until the editor and I agreed it was ready for publication. And then, some indeterminate time later, it might be available for people to read.

In a way, being “done” writing this book is the beginning of trying to get it published, which again if I’m very lucky will probably include revisions.

Still, I do want to note this day.

A (not so brief) history of 5 drafts

I began writing this book 3 years and a few months ago, on November 1st. I remember that, because for a few weeks I’d been doing all the necessary prep to begin writing the first draft (I’ve been planning and developing this book for over a decade), and kept freaking out about actually putting words down and beginning the process. It felt to me like once I actually put words down, I either finish the draft and continue working on the book until it’s done, or I give up somewhere along the way, for whatever reason, and the failure hangs over me forever. (A small intervention and lots of hugs from writer friends was required to get me to overcome that freakout.)

And then I realized that it was November 1st, and Nanowrimo had started, and was like, well! I always wanted to do Nano, sounds like a perfect opportunity. It’ll give ma schedule and motivation to get through the draft quickly, and prevent me from thinking about things too much.

So I did that. I wrote 50,000 words during the actual month of November. In the post I wrote about the lessons I learned from Nanowrimo, I mention that I basically did nothing but work, write and sleep (barely). But I got it done!

I then needed a break to do other things, and then I came back to the draft and wrote 30,000 words more, for a total of 80k. I then went over the whole thing to make it readable and understandable to someone other than me. I knew I’d need that pass when I started Nano, so for me that whole process was part of getting to a proper first draft, the kind I could actually send out for beta.

I knew, even before I started Nano, that the book would likely have 5 drafts all in all. Or rather, I hoped it would be 5, because I couldn’t see myself finishing it with fewer, but knew that it could certainly balloon up to however many drafts would be necessary to fix its various problems.

And so, the Nano draft was the first one. It took me about 5 months, if memory serves, after those feverish 31 days, to get the text to where it worked and made sense to an outsider.

I remember because I went to Worldcon that year (the last Worldcon before the pandemic), I was leaving in July and I knew I had to finish the draft and send it to betas now, or risk taking many more months to do so. I was beginning to discover that writing a draft was always a very intense time for me, and if I let up even a little bit, if I took a real break from it, it took a while to get back into that headspace.

I was still missing the book’s ending by the time I had to leave for Ireland, so for the last 8-10k I pasted in what I’d written for Nano.

Beta comments came back, for the most part, before I even landed in Dublin. Keep in mind the book was about 80,000 words at that point! Still unbelievable to me, as a slow reader. I thought a few weeks of travel would mean not stressing about when my beta readers would be done, but they ended up being weeks when I was vaguely frustrated I couldn’t do anything about the feedback I already had, lol.

As I’d predicted, it took a while for me to get back into the book when I came back from travel. I didn’t really start until November, again for Nano. This time though I was editing a draft, not writing a new one. I still used the Nano website, which turned out to be extremely useful and helpful.

That second draft ended up being the longest of the novel so far: 137k words. Basically, feedback from the first draft came down to there being a lot of the book missing, and so in the second draft I just put everything in. Every piece that had been in my head but not on the page made it into this one.

I used a lot of the same Nanowrimo tools to write it as before, but the draft just… wouldn’t end. Because I write so intensely during a draft, it was also hard to maintain that level of total commitment to writing, at the cost of everything else including my health, for long.

By February 2020 I felt like the draft would take forever to complete, and derail the tentative schedule I’d set for myself entirely. “Thankfully” that was when the pandemic began. Due to fortunate circumstances, my job at the time essentially put me on paid leave for about 5 weeks.

These were the days of the very first lockdowns, when everything was terrifying, and very little was known about the virus. For 5 weeks I was basically shut in at home with one other person, the two of us barely going outside or meeting anyone.

The writing helped me deal with the anxiety and uncertainty of that time. Without social obligations or my day job, I could spend literally all day writing, and not think about anything else, which is what I did. I wrote 62,000 words in the first 3 weeks of that period, completing the second draft. I wrote more fully about that process and all the techniques I used to motivate myself and stay on track, with pictures!

By April the new draft went out to betas.

Again, an intense period of writing meant a long, long break. Once I was done with the draft, it was harder to get my mind off the world falling apart, globally but also personally. A lot changed for me in the coming months – I lost my job, had to change my living situation, and of course, there was still a pandemic raging outside.

It took a long time to get beta feedback, and to decide what to do with it. I’d basically written an extremely bare bones first draft, and an extremely bloated second one, and now I needed to decide what the third would look like.

Again, I found myself working on it in the fall, though this time there was no point in doing Nano. I knew the draft would be mostly editing, some rewriting. I needed to distill the story to the parts that really mattered, create a cohesive and complete version of it that I would then make better and better. Draft 3 needed to be the last one with major structural changes.

I spent more time planning and strategizing about the 3rd draft than any other. The writing was secondary to the outlining, the preliminary work that needed to be done before I started changing the words.

I ended up planning for about 3 months, and then writing through the winter and early spring. The draft ended up 112k, and I knew it was a far more cohesive, complete version of the narrative. I’d gotten rid of one of the main characters, I’d thrown out a bunch of sections, I’d changed the order of things here and there.

Draft 3 went to betas almost a year after draft 2 was complete. In March 2021.

This time I kept the circle small again. I wanted a mix of people who had fresh eyes on the work, but also people who’d seen it grow and change and could tell me whether I was going in the right direction.

This time, perhaps because the writing period had been longer and not so overwhelmingly intense, I could also get back to writing the next draft much quicker.

Again, I spent more time planning out changes based on the feedback, strategizing and working on the outline. I felt like at this point, this would be the bulk of the work. There was really nothing I could improve anymore by just diving into the story, 90% of the work had to be in looking at structural things, elements, characters, etc., and making big-picture changes.

Basically, the cycle of beta feedback went like this:

1st draft:

Good potential, bits and pieces of this are good, but overall it doesn’t work

2nd draft:

OK, the second half works, but the first half totally doesn’t

3rd draft:

OK, the first quarter of this doesn’t work, but once you get past that it gets good

So a lot of my focus for draft 4 was to improve that first quarter. I wrote different versions of the opening scenes, outlined the first quarter specifically, really tried to break it down and reassemble it so it actually worked better.

I was almost done with draft 4 by August 2021, when my life changed drastically again, limiting my writing time to almost zero for a good few months. I was so close though! Just another week or two of work on the draft and I’d have been done.

Ultimately, I did finish the 4th draft, though I didn’t send it out for a full round of beta. I showed parts of it, got feedback on specific changes, specific scenes or moments.

This draft was basically improving the first quarter of the book and fine tuning everything else. It ended up being 115k. Not ideal, but ultimately doable for an epic fantasy.

This brings us almost to current times.

I could have sent the book out to agents after draft 4, I knew that many writers would have sent it even earlier. But for me, it needed one more pass: exclusively for the prose.

I’m sure part of this is influenced by me not actually being a native English speaker, and the other part by the fact that I was a poet before I was a writer (though my poetry was published later than my prose), but I’d spent 3 years working on this book giving myself permission not to care about phrasing or cleverness or the elegance of the prose, because I knew every word would end up getting rewritten.

Now, when it was finally Done, I had to take time to actually go over the language and make sure none of it was too embarrassing. I thought I’d take 4-6 weeks to go over the manuscript at my leisure, tightening phrasing, getting rid of redundancies, catching tiny continuity errors.

I deliberately set a rule for myself that this final pass would not be for anything but prose changes. No matter how much my brain might try to convince me that actually, the entire third act needs to be restructured, I had given this book so much time and attention, and I was happy with it, and it was time to move on. The prose pass was for style exclusively, not substance.

And so, here we are. Due to constraints that I can’t talk about yet (maybe one day! if the book ever sells) I actually finished the prose pass my earlier.

**Behold the spines of my enemies:** During the final prose pass I printed out the entire manuscript in tiny font and went over it with my editing pen, and then updated the changes in google docs. Each physical page I was done with got folded up and put under my screen for some reason.

I began on January 7th and finished it 20 days later. I ended up cutting about 1,000 words of prose, ending up with a final draft of 114,000.

The book is done. It’s as good as I can make it with my meager talents, and from here whether it ever sees the light of day is ultimately not within my control.

**1:15AM, January 28th**, and I’m *almost* done. Just 10 more pages of the file to go through in my prose pass.

I can’t believe it’s actually over. This project will no longer be the main thing I’m doing. It’s moving from the WIP folder to the “complete” folder, if only in my head, which is just… wasn’t sure this day would come, you know?

Thank you, to anyone reading this, for making it this far. If we’ve spoken at any time during the last 3 years, thank you for being part of the journey of writing this book. I am accepting all good wishes at this time that someone will want to publish it, haha.

But regardless of its status within the commercial realm of publishing, I did it. I finished it. I started and I kept at it and now it’s done. It’s not the most stellar, but it’s not too shabby either, in my own estimation, which I’m enormously proud of.

What will I do next?

Something tells me working on my next novel right now would be a bad idea, I really do need a break. So, fanfiction, my podcast, articles and short stories I owe to editors, all of those are now possibilities!

Stay tuned 🙂

Pop Culture Sociologist Q&A!

For this special episode listeners submitted questions and the host answered them in a live, unscripted recording. Questions included everything from the writing process to opinions about genres and different social issues.

You can navigate the episode using these timestamps:

0:00 – Intro and an explanation about what this episode is, where questions came from, and how the episode works.

3:09 –
I would love to hear about the writing process for each episode – if there is a standard process and if so what is it?

19:30 –
Do you start from a phenomenon and look for suitable works or vice versa?

25:10 –
In writing the episodes and analyzing media – how prominent is your inner author vs the former sociology student?

28:29 –
How do you balance between choosing topics that are popular / catchy enough to be interesting to others, and avoiding topics that are overdone?

35:45 –
Who do you think is the perfect / target audience for the podcast?

43:42 –
A question about the last episode – are you going to revisit the topic after watching the second season of “Motherland: Fort Salem”? I’m really curious to hear what you’ll have to say about it, in comparison and in general.

47:22 –
In the episode on Fort Salem you touched a bit on the issue of loyalty to a team made up entirely of women. Are there more examples of female partnerships and female friendship in the media you love?

51:22 –
I was wondering if you wanted to expand on dealing with real historical people in fiction from the KJ Charles/Devil’s Mistress episode. In one of her books (Seditious Affair), Charles uses not only characters but dialogue gleaned from trial documents to tell about a doomed group of rebels, and I find it personally so sad to read because I know they were really hanged. How do you think choices like this help or hinder the overall effect of what an author is trying to do?

55:58 –
Can you compare Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, and how the two works deal with World War II and its aftermath (Lord of the Rings for Germany against the Allies, and Harry Potter with the idea of the superiority of pure-blooded sorcerers).

59:28 –
Please tell the whole class how black sails is a perfect series and everyone should watch it.

1:06:27 –
Whats the right way to bridge a cultural gap (for example – Americans who write about China, white people writing about black people, straights about queer people, etc.), and is it right to try and bridge that gap at all?

1:08:13 –
How does audiovisual pop culture use poetry? What does it mean when a character reads, writes, quotes, or recites poetry in film/TV/video games — what does that tend to say about that character, and what does that say about our popular conception of poets and poetry?

1:12:08 –
What are you looking for today in historical novels (or series / movies) and where did you find it?

1:17:29 –
Is there a chance that in future episodes you’ll talk about children’s literature / fantasy / detective / romantic novel

1:21:19 – Final thoughts

Pop Culture Sociologist Episode 3 bonus post: “Person of Interest” Episode Guide

If you haven’t yet listened to episode 2 of Pop Culture Sociologist I hope you’ll do so before continuing to read this post!

Here’s the episode for your listening convenience:

(Don’t forget to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the app of your choice if you don’t want to miss future episodes!)

So, during this episode I mention a viewing guide for “Person of Interest” if you only want to see the “good parts”, or at least what to me were the best parts.

(A disclaimer that I mention in the episode but feel the need to expand on here: the procedural plots on the show go consciously working against various biases to leaning into those biases pretty hard. The farther away you get from season 1 the more true that is.)

First, if you do want to watch the best of what the show has to offer with Reese and Finch, before Shaw and Root arrive on the scene, here’s what I’d suggest:

1×01 – Suicidal homeless veteran John Reese is hired by a mysterious figure to help save lives.

1×10+1×11 – the beginning of 1×10 and start of 1×11 is about a mission that ends with Reese getting shot and then rescued by his employer, Harold Finch.

1×17 – Reese and Finch adopt a baby! I’m not usually someone who finds babies adorable, and I truly can’t stress how wonderful this episode is.

1×18 – Finch does field work and pays for it – getting drugged and having to be rescued by Reese.

1×21 – Reese’s ~tragic backstory~ episode. Finch gives Reese the day off when he realizes their next case has to do with domestic violence.

OK, and now for the real reason we’re here, the root/Shaw show! This episode guide will include: mandatory viewing and optional viewing. (Optional viewing means episodes are not necessary, I think, to enjoy the core of the emotional/character arcs, but they add texture and detail and layers.)

2×16 – “Relevance”. Sameen Shaw, a medical school grad and former marine, works for a secret government organization tasked with “eliminating” threats to national security. However, Sameen’s partner is having doubts about how the organization acquires its information and how accurate the info is, and when the organization tries to kill Sameen and her partner those doubts become part of Sameen’s reality as well.

This episode is completely standalone and completely self-contained. Honestly, if you watch nothing else of this show, do yourself a favor and watch this. Sarah Shahi is fantastic in this mini-movie about the toughest, most dispassionate government assassin ever to be betrayed by her own organization. Her medical competence, her emotional detachment, her determination to claw her way to safety and freedom and revenge in the face of unbeatable forces is a sight to be seen.

3×06 – “Mors Praematura” In 2×16 Shaw is introduced to Samantha “Root” Groves, a brilliant hacker with a fondness for torture implements who gets under Shaw’s skin by tricking her into lowering her guard. In 3×06 Root finds Shaw again, tazers her and drags her on an adventure to save the world.

Optional – 2×02 “Bad Code” Root’s backstory and an expansion of her original ideology. 12 year old Sam Groves witnessed her best friend get kidnapped and murdered and told every single authority she could think of, only for them to do nothing. This made her turn into a vigilante hacker with a pretty bleak view of humanity.

3×12 – “Aletheia” Root rescues Shaw and Finch from certain death, letting herself get shot and captured (to everyone’s surprise) to allow them to flee.

Optional – 3×05 “Razgovor”. Shaw’s backstory episode where she bonds with a girl she must rescue and remembers the night she realized she “wasn’t normal” – when her father was killed and she didn’t really have any emotions about it. I’m not a fan of this episode because of its overwhelming, astounding Russian fail, but it does have a lot of backstory.

Optional – 3×10 “The Devil’s Share” Mostly an episode about Reese’s drama but features a flashback that explains why Shaw quit medicine. (During her residency she was “found out” by a superior who told her he’d never allow her to become a doctor due to her clinical lack of empathy towards human beings.)

3×17 – “/” Root, having used the injuries from being tortured in a previous episode (3×12) to get implants so she’s now plugged directly into the omniscient Machine that surveils everyone in the world, follows the Machine’s orders to use various people, teaming up with Shaw and the rest of the gang to keep the evil company trying to build a rival (evil!) Machine from succeeding in their mission. A very clever, very fun episode I highly recommend.

3×23 – “Deus Ex Machina” Root and Shaw team up to save the world yet again, in the familiar pattern where Root calls the shots and Shaw provides the fire power/tactical advantage. While the world seemingly crumbles around them, Shaw is certain Root’s plan will prevent the new evil AI, “Samaritan”, from coming online, only to discover that the situation is far more dire than she realized.

4×02 – “Nautilus” Root’s relationship with the Machine is mirrored in Samaritan recruiting its own brilliant, messed up young woman to serve as its operative. Shaw, Root and the gang try to stop it from happening.

4×07 – “Honor Among Thieves” Shaw goes undercover to infiltrate a group of international thieves while Root serves as the “voice in her ear” feeding her surveillance info.

4×09 – “The Devil You Know” Shaw’s secret identity is discovered by Samaritan and Root must drag her to safety while the others are in danger.

4×10 – “The Cold War” Samaritan decides to take its war with the Machine to the next level and demands a “face to face” meeting. Root, the Machine’s “human interface” travels to parley with Samaritan’s equivalent.

4×11 – “If-Then-Else” As the team rushes to prevent a Samaritan-initiated apocalypse Root and Shaw finally discuss their mutual attraction (over gunfire, of course). Shaw admits she too has feelings for Root. The gang succeeds in their mission to stop Samaritan (for the time being) but at the last moment a sacrifice must be made, and after Reese is shot Shaw remains the team’s last heavy hitter. (I truly can’t recommend this episode enough, I was completely 100% spoiled for it and I still found it very affecting. Shaw’s scenes especially are handled to perfection.)

Optional – 4×12 – Root and Reese team up to search for Shaw, wreaking havoc and kidnapping “Control”, the head of the government agency that works with Samaritan. It’s revealed Finch believes Shaw is already dead.

4×13 – “M.I.A” Root and Reese’s search for Shaw continues. New intel leads them to a small town in upstate New York where an injured Shaw might have been taken. As Shaw recuperates under Samaritan’s control Root and the Machine experience their first rift, when the Machine tells Root to stop looking.

4×18 – “Skip” Root returns and finds Finch on the brink of dealing Samaritan a serious blow. Unfortunately, she has to stop him, knowing it will probably cost her his friendship and her place on the team.

4×21 – “Asylum” Root receives a distress call from Shaw. Knowing it’s probably a trap, she traces the call to a mental hospital and goes undercover (with Finch) to try and find her.

Optional – 4×22 – the season finale, in which Root, Finch and Reese struggle to keep the Machine alive.

Optional – 5×01 “B.S.O.D.” This episodes sets up the full arc of the final season and gives a framework for understanding the plot of later episodes for Root.

5×04 – “6,741” We finally meet Shaw again, and find out what’s been happening with her. Knowing conventional methods of torture would be ineffective, Samaritan has been applying psychological torture, making Shaw relive simulations of killing her friends over and over.

5×06 – “A More Perfect Union” More details about what Shaw’s going through, as her captors grow increasingly desperate and try anything they can to get to give them the information they want.

5×07 – “QSO” Shaw and Root finally manage to communicate! Just as things look to be at their worst for Shaw, when she’s struggling to tell reality and simulation apart, she gets a message from Root that gives her hope.

Optional – 5×08 “Reassortment” This has a few scenes with Shaw escaping imprisonment. Good set up for the next episode’s events.

5×09 – “Sotto Voce” Root and Shaw are reunited at last! At their dramatic reunion Root is able to finally convince Shaw what’s real and what isn’t, and that their feelings for each other are in the former category.

Optional – 5×10 – “The Day the World Went Away” Root’s final episode, where she dies. I put this under optional because if you’d rather quit this pairing on a high note, you can totally skip it.

Optional – 5×11, 5×12, 5×13 These are the final episodes of the show, and each contain various things related to Root and Shaw. Finch mourns Root’s loss, Shaw kills the person who killed Root before saying her final goodbyes at Root’s grave, and in the final episode Reese dies as well.

I hope you enjoyed the episode and this post, and I hope you’ll consider subscribing to Pop Culture Sociologist at your podcast venue of choice, and/or supporting the podcast on Patreon, so I can continue creating these episodes and bonus posts 🙂

For more thoughts on media, queer relationship and science fiction, you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook.

Pop Culture Sociologist Episode 2 bonus post: Women Artists of the Renaissance

If you haven’t yet listened to episode 2 of Pop Culture Sociologist I hope you’ll do so before continuing to read this post!

Here’s the episode for your listening convenience:

(Don’t forget to subscribe on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or the app of your choice if you don’t want to miss future episodes!)

So, during this episode I mention that Lyanna Stark’s story illustrates a phenomenon we can see unraveling in pretty much every field – women’s accomplishments being written out of history.

In the episode I mention the 16th century book, still widely available today: “The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects” by Giorgio Vasari.

The four women mentioned in the book are:

Today we only have access to some of the works of the first three. Madonna Lucrezia’s have unfortunately not survived to this day, so all we know about her is what little Vasari mentions in his book.

But of course, there were many more women artists working and excelling during this time period, in Italy and outside of it. For a very partial overview, here’s an article about 8 influential women artists during the renaissance.

As you know if you’ve listened to the episode: I am not an art historian. I don’t know much more about any of the women mentioned by Vasari than their Wikipedia pages (linked above) can tell you.

So, in this post I aim to give you a little bit of everything: a starting point with Wikipedia, some visual references for the most famous works, and some more specific links to various art-focused organizations with information about them.

Properzia de’Rossi (1490–1530)

For more information about de’Rossi’s work you can read about her on artsy.com, and if you’d like you can read Vasari’s original entry about her.

Sister Plautilla Nelli (1524–1588)

Here you can read more about Nelli, this painting, and the art of nuns during the Italian renaissance in general.

And here’s more about Nelli’s art and the project to restore it for modern audiences from Advancing Women Artists.

Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 – 1625)

Here’s a timeline of some of Agnuissola’s most famous paintings, with some interesting info about each of them.

And here are 22 of Agnuissola’s paintings on WikiArt.

For more hot takes about the Italian renaissance, you can follow me on Twitter or Facebook. (Warning: there will likely not be many hot takes about the Italian renaissance.)

Introducing: Pop Culture Sociologist!

Towards the end of 2020, the plague year, when I became unemployed for the first time in my adult life, when I finished the second draft of a novel, when very odd and not entirely cheerful things were happening around the world, I decided to start a podcast.

The point of starting it was that I missed doing media criticism, but couldn’t justify the time it took to pitch and write proper articles, or even blog posts, because all the time I could spend writing in front of a computer had to be spent on writing fiction, or in very rare cases when I really felt like letting loose and treating myself, fanfiction.

Creatively, it was pretty dispiriting. My novel was nowhere near done, I was about to start my third year of working on it, I poured so many hours of my life into writing it and none of it was publishable. And I really missed sharing my thoughts about media with people!

So, a podcast seemed like the perfect solution. Apparently you could just make them at home now, and being audio, it wouldn’t compete with my writing time. Perfect!

Needless to say, a lot of those assumptions turned out to be… not quite true? But I still went ahead and created a podcast. Pop Culture Sociologist, because I figured whatever I was talking about it would be related to sociology somehow. It’s the field that colors my view of the world the most.

As of writing this post there is a trailer for the podcast, and also a first episode! I promise every future episode will have its own post, but for this first one I was still very much testing things out and learning the basics.

Anyway, the responses have already been amazing, and I’m so, so grateful I was able to spend time on this project. In the first 3 weeks the podcast (trailer + 1st episode) has been downloaded over 250 times (not all of those are actually unique listeners of course, but it’s still a staggering number).

But more than that, people keep talking to me about it, which is the most amazing thing and the reason I love media criticism to begin with. There’s nothing more amazing than knowing people are interested in your ideas, and it’s been a really great ray of sunshine in these Troubled Times.

After the first episode launched I also created a Patreon to allow people to support the podcast if they wanted to. I’ve resisted getting a Patreon for years as a writer, for a variety of reasons (to be clear: Patreons are great and I encourage anyone who wants one to open one!), but as a podcaster I guess that’s changed. Mostly because writing, for me, “costs” only my time, and when I was still writing short stories I also made a few hundred dollars a year doing it, which covered things like website costs.

But with a podcast, the costs are much greater, because you’re producing a piece of media, and 2021 is not a great time for me financially, so friends have held my hand and told me this is a perfectly fine reason to allow people to pitch in, if they want to.

Anyway, here we go, the intro post is done! For weeks before I took the plunge I walked around asking friends to talk me out of doing a podcast. But now it’s real, and it’s out there, people seem to like it. Can’t wait to see what’s next on this adventure, and hope you’ll take come along with me to find out!