The Next Big Thing

I’ve been tagged by Erik Larson to talk about the novel I have in progress in his Next Big Thing blog post. The Next Big Thing is where a writer answers ten questions about a novel he or she is working on, and then tags other authors to answer the same questions. 




1. What is the title of your Work in Progress?

Umbral Heretic

2. Where did the idea come from for the book?
I think these characters have been rattling around in my head in one form or another for well over a decade. I got the idea for one scene in my novel (the one where my healer character finds the protagonist beaten up and devoid of his memories) when I was walking my dog along Boulder Creek back when I was in grad school in Colorado. The idea sort of shuffled to the back of my brain, but it popped up from time to time, and I gradually fleshed it out over the years.

3. What genre does your book fall under?
I've been thinking of it as adult high fantasy, but  I'm not sure everyone agrees with my definition of the genre. I'll probably query it simply as fantasy.

4. Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?
This is a tough question for me, as I don't spend a lot of time following celebrities, so most of my favorite actors are older now ... way too old to be playing characters in their twenties.
Both Jarrod and Tesk are reasonably tall (Jarrod around 6' and Tesk around 5'9"-5'10") and have brownish eyes and hair and are active, strong people. Most of the young actresses out there today seem to be little slips of things. Of course, Hollywood has always been good at manipulating camera angles and so forth.
Maybe for Tesk, someone who looks like Jewel Staite (though taller and more muscular). or Siebil Kekili from Game of Thrones, though both of these gals are over thirty. For Jarrod ... hmmm. Seems like most of the young actors are too pretty or too smarmy, so no one's leaping out at me.

5. What is a one-sentence synopsis of the book?

A magically damaged exile must master his rogue talent and defeat a network of dark wizards who seek to return the world to a time of chaos and terror.

6. Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

I hope to find an agent.

7. How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?
It took about a year to get a complete manuscript with no gaps in it.
I am an on the fly reviser, though, so by the time I got to the end of the manuscript, I'd rewritten parts of the first 1/2-2/3 of the book several times. The "first" draft is really more like a second draft for this reason.

8. What other books would you compare this story to in your genre?
Well, some of my favorite contemporary fantasy and sci fi writers include Lynn Flewelling, Mercedes Lackey, Robin Hobb, CJ Cherryh, Anne McCaffrey and  Glenda Larke. I think It would be arrogant to compare myself to these writers, but it is certainly true that various aspects of their narrative style, characterization and world building have influenced me more than old style fantasy writers like Tolkien, Norton or Leiber (who I also enjoy as authors).

9. Who or what inspired you to write this book?
I've been wanting to write since I was a kid and have been taking abortive forays into writing for my entire life. Aside from a couple of short stories I wrote for a class back in college, though, I never finished anything. I'm not sure why I finally got the wherewithal to finish a draft of a novel length work (and a few short stories) at last. I think I just got sort of addicted to writing for the sake of writing. It helped finding a good online writing community as well, as I've never had much luck finding a local writers' group that focuses on speculative fiction.

10. What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?
I feel that the book is definitely character driven, but it's set in a world that blends elements of traditional high fantasy with some newer approaches to world building. Although the story is character driven and the plot centers around intrigue and conflict between characters, there is some sword and sorcery style action and even a little romance.

It takes place in a world where the naturalistic nature of magic has informed and enhanced people's knowledge in some ways and held it back in others. It is probably about halfway along the spectrum of idealized to gritty in that it takes place in a world with plenty of unpleasantness, but most people are striving (with varying degrees of competence and success) to do the right thing and move things forward. I hope it appeals to people who like conflicted and flawed characters and a dose of realism but have grown a bit tired of fantasy and sci fi worlds that take place in very dystopian societies where no one (including the protagonists) give a damn about anything except for gaining power over others or exacting revenge.

The protagonist (Jarrod) has several apparently conflicting goals and faces plenty of external obstacles and adversaries throughout the book, but ultimately, his largest adversary may be himself. I hope some readers may find that relatable as well.

Oh yes, and there's a dog....

Include the link of who tagged you and this explanation for the people you have tagged.

Erik Larson tagged me. http://www.welarson.com/?p=344

I tagged Nick Mena: http://sancochopot.blogspot.com/

Pesky POVs

I'm taking a little stab at discussing craft today. I always feel a little phony doing this, since I'm not a professional writer. So I've written this as much to consolidate my own learning process as to be seen as a writing guru dispensing pearls of wisdom that no one else can provide.

I've done enough critiquing of other writer's stories by now to notice that some people have more trouble with point of view (pov) than others. Traditionally, most fantasy stories are written in third person, and recent years, most are in some form of limited third (with occasional dives into omniscient for prologues, introductory chapters or transitional scenes).

The greatest area of difficulty seems to be with writers who do something called head hopping. Usually, head hopping is accidental, but occasionally, I've read a scene that looks like it was written by a kangaroo on cappuccino but the author defends his or her approach by saying it's all right to head hop, because it's written in omniscient.

This often spawns a discussion (which can become heated) about authorial voice and whether it's a good idea for a beginner to try and write omniscient in the current market and whether stories where the reader is tightly tied to what the protagonist senses and knows are more engaging than ones where the reader can be aware of things the characters are not. But these debates bypass the fact that third person omniscient does not feel like head hopping when it's done properly. To put it another way, saying you are writing in omniscient does not make head hopping okay.

There are a ton of bloggers out there who have done a good job of discussing the various points of view in writing and who refer readers to various published works for examples. I'm going to take a different approach with this piece. I took a very short snippet from a chapter in my book that takes place at a party (the original is written is a fairly close or deep third pov) and had some fun rewriting it into different povs and as a head hoppy passage. I am hoping that it illustrates the differences in a fairly concrete way.

Limited third person (deep or close):

Jarrod smiled stiffly as Master Eammon introduced him to a bewildering array of people. Councilors, entertainers, academics--the mage seemed to know all sorts. Everyone's eyes lingered on his face for an extra second before flicking politely away.

Tesk flashed him one of her heart-stopping smiles. "Don't worry about them." Her green dress showed just enough silky-smooth skin to make him tingle in ways he didn't want to think about in public. How had he ever thought of her as ordinary? He averted his eyes before she caught him staring like the damned fool that he was. No woman in her right mind would welcome attention from a battered husk like him.

This is very similar to how it might be written first, except for the pronouns. This is my favorite pov to read and write, but I'll admit that I do hybridize it with a more detached pov sometimes, especially in scenes where I need to clarify that something is a thought or a realization or whatever, or when doing so just makes things feel a little clearer.

Limited third (more detached):

Jarrod smiled stiffly as Master Eammon introduced him to a bewildering array of people. Councilors, entertainers, academics--the mage seemed to know all sorts. Jarrod noticed that everyone's eyes lingered on his face for an extra second before flicking politely away.

"Don't worry about them." Tesk flashed him one of her heart-stopping smiles. Her green dress showed just enough silky-smooth skin to make Jarrod tingle in ways he didn't want to think about in public.

How did I ever think of her as ordinary? he wondered. He averted his eyes, knowing he was staring at her like a damned fool. He doubted that any woman in her right mind would welcome attention from a battered husk like him.

This is similar to the previous passage. We're still only getting Jarrod's pov and we're still seeing inside his head, but notice how I've changed the wording in a few places. I'm tagging some of the things Jarrod is noticing, doubting or thinking as such, rather than simply stating them directly. Also, there is an extra paragraph break, since turning Jarrod's thought about Tesk not being ordinary into a tagged "internal dialog" creates what is, in essence, a new speaker. So we need a paragraph shift.

Third omniscient:

Jarrod smiled stiffly as Master Eammon introduced him to a bewildering array of people. Councilors, entertainers, academics--the mage seemed to know all sorts. Everyone noticed Jarrod's scarred and branded face and stared for an extra second before remembering their manners and looking away.

"Don't worry about them." Tesk flashed him a smile, knowing full well that her green dress showed just enough silky-smooth skin to make Jarrod tingle in ways he didn't want to think about in public.

Completely unaware that she'd selected the dress with him in mind, Jarrod averted his eyes. How did I ever think of her as ordinary? he wondered. He doubted that any woman in her right mind would welcome attention from a battered husk like him.

Writing this was a bit harder for me, because I don't generally write in omniscient, and few of the books I've read in recent years are written in this pov. I had to pull some of my older books from my shelves for a refresher on how the authors did it. Someone more used to writing in this pov could probably provide a better example than I have.

But notice how we now are privy to some information that Jarrod isn't. We know that the people Eammon is introducing him to actually do notice his face and it's not just Jarrod's perception that they do. We also discover that Tesk wanted Jarrod to notice her dress, even though Jarrod doesn't know this. What I did not do was present "deep" thoughts from different characters without tagging (or present deep thoughts from different characters in the same paragraph).

I've encountered some conflicting advice about how important a strong narrative presence is with omniscient. It's certainly stronger and more noticeable than it is with either type of third. There is a type of omniscient (exemplified by CS Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia) where the narrator is almost a character in the story at times. With the narrator telling you the story, you're less likely to get confused when he or she tells you about what different characters are seeing and thinking, because you are really inside the narrator's head. But not all omniscient narratives are exactly the same. Examples of more modern novels with omniscient povs would be The Hitchhiker's Guide books by Douglas Adams, and even parts of the opening chapters in JK Rowling's Harry Potter Books (though she then reverts to a more limited third for pretty much the rest of each book).

Head Hopping:

Jarrod smiled stiffly as Master Eammon introduced him to a bewildering array of people. Councilors, entertainers, academics--the mage seemed to know all sorts. Everyone noticed Jarrod's scarred and branded face an stared for an extra second before they remembered their manners and looked away. Did they have to stare at him?

"Don't worry about them." Tesk flashed him a smile. Hopefully, he wasn't feeling too self conscious. Her green dress showed just enough silky-smooth skin to make Jarrod tingle in ways he didn't want to dwell on in public. How had he ever thought of her as ordinary? Completely unaware that she'd selected the dress with him in mind, he averted his eyes.  He doubted that any woman in her right mind would welcome the attentions of a battered husk like him.

This scene violates a couple of rules, which make it hard for a reader to follow it (well, I know I can't follow it, and I wrote it). Firstly, we are switching perspectives/pov in the same paragraph--and in back to back sentences at that. Secondly, we are Putting untagged, "deep pov" type sentences (how had he ever thought of her as ordinary? and Hopefully, he wasn't feeling too self conscious) in the middle of paragraphs that have more than one pov/perspective presented in it. Not tagging the pov in an omniscient scene will confuse readers. It's a bit like mixing two flavors that are delicious separately but yucky in the same dish.

Omniscient is a tough pov to get right, though there are some wonderful novels that make use of it. I am a firm believer that there are few (if any) hard and fast rules in writing (well, commas splices are always bad, I think). But if your reviewers are confused or say they think you're head hopping when you're shooting for omniscient, it probably means you haven't gotten it quite right.

King Richard III's grave

I've been busy with the start of a new school year and so have been neglecting my blog lately. I ran across this article, however, and thought I'd link it. If anyone else is a Blackadder fan, well, this article made me remember an episode in the first series of the show. On a serious note, I absolutely love this kind of archeology. One of the things I really envy our across the pond neighbors is how they are always finding new archeological treasures. We have some fascinating stuff here in the Americas as well, of course, but the sheer density of the European population for the past few thousand years  means that something priceless could lurk beneath any parking lot.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48995408/ns/technology_and_science-science/#.UFDmgFF618E

For Want of a Horse

Like many women (and some men too), I loved horses when I was a kid. I still do, though nowadays I am more likely to be running alongside my dogs as they race around an agility course than hurtling over jumps (or around barrels) on a horse's back. I never realized my adolescent ambition of owning my own horse, but I did work at a stable for a couple of years as a teen and I've taken riding lessons off and on since I was a kid.

One of the things that appeals to many people about traditional high fantasy settings is the notion of using horses as transportation. There is no doubt that mechanical conveyances are faster, not to mention easier to care for. But the emotional bond that can form between horse and rider has long been romanticized in folklore and literature.

Since most people living in the modern world have had only passing contact with equines, there are a lot of things that people don't know about these animals and a lot of inaccuracies that can creep into stories with horses in them. If someone is setting a story in an actual historic setting, or is trying to create a parallel world that is at the exact same level of social development as a historic period, the potential for anachronisms exists as well.

I thought I'd rack my memories, do a little research and put down some "fun facts" about horses that may be useful to anyone writing a fantasy (or other stories) where travel by horseback or in carriages is involved. I delved into my collection of Equus magazines for some of this information, and did a little web research for the rest.

How fast can a horse travel?

A horse can walk 3-4 mph (a league was once defined as the distance a horse could walk in an hour).

A horse can trot about 8 mph (though this varies with breed and conformation)

A horse can canter 10-17 mph

A horse can gallop 25-30 mph

A horse can only gallop at top speed for a few miles/minutes at a time and will have to spend some time recovering afterwards at a walk (just as you would after running a foot race). On a long journey, a rider typically alternates between walking and trotting and the horse will need some brief rests over the course of the day and a long rest in between. It can canter or gallop for brief periods, but this will be more strenuous and require more recovery.

A well-conditioned horse that is not carrying a really heavy rider or load could ostensibly travel up to 100 miles in a day, but this would be exhausting and not something the animal could do day after day.

For a horse on a long journey of several days, 20-30 miles in a day would be more sustainable. The load a horse is carrying, its overall condition (and the terrain) will affect this.

How much weight can a horse carry or pull?

Saddle horses typically range from 875-1300 pounds and can safely carry 15-30% of their body weight. Live weight (a rider) is easier to carry than dead weight (a pack) since riders can shift their weight to make things easier for the horse. So pack horses may show signs of stress when they are carrying 25% of their weight or more.

Horses can pull considerably more weight than they can carry. It is not too hard for a horse to be able to pull its own weight, and they can even pull several times their own weight for shorter distances. The size of the vehicle's wheels make a difference, with larger wheels being easier to pull than smaller ones but conveyances with smaller wheels providing faster acceleration and greater maneuverability.

Dray (or draugh/draft) breeds, such as modern Clydesdales can weigh more than 2000 pounds and stand 18 or more hands (a hand is four inches) high!  The heavy horses used by knights were the ancestors of many of the dray breeds that are still around today, though horses (and people) tended to be shorter back then.

How much food and water does a horse need?

Whether or not a rider needs to carry grain for a horse will depend on how hard he/she is working the animal and how much forage there is along the way or if they are stopping at inns at night.

A typical diet for a 1000 pound horse doing moderate work would be 20-25 pounds of feed a day, most of which would be hay or grass (if grass, the weight will be higher, due to its high moisture content). Approximately 2-5 pounds of this would typically be taken in as grain (often oats or mixed feeds) each day, though this amount would vary depending on the amount of work the horse is doing and how much grass or hay is available. Horses do better with frequent small meals than they do with just 1-2 large meals a day. Horses that have adequate time to graze and are not being worked really hard usually do fine with just hay and grass in their diet.

A horse will drink 6-10 gallons of water a day on average, and of course if it is working hard or in hot conditions, it will need considerably more. It is not possible to carry enough water for a horse's needs, even for just a day or two. This means horses are not useful in very arid environments where there are long pulls between water holes.

Potential anachronisms in historic settings

Horseshoes: The inventor of the horseshoe is unknown, but they came into existence in the early middle ages. Horses that are not traveling a lot over hard/paved/rocky surfaces actually do quite well without shoes, but the invention of shoes did prevent excess hoof wear once people began to pave streets. Prior to the middle ages, Asian horsemen used leather booties when horses were traveling over rough terrain, and Romans sometimes fitted horses with leather "hipposandals." There is no record of people nailing pieces of metal to horses' feet until the 6th or 7th centuries CE. By around 1000 CE, cast bronze shoes with nail holes made an appearance, and iron horseshoes became widespread by the 13th or 14th centuries.

Stirrups. Although the horse was first domesticated around 4500 BCE, the saddle didn't make an appearance until around 800 BCE and the stirrup not until 200-300 CE.

Sidesaddles: Although there were prototypes available as early as the 13th century, they did not allow for easy control of a mount, and so European ladies often rode with split skirts or on pillion saddles behind male riders until the 16th century when a more usable design was developed.

Horse Collar: The horse collar was an improvement over chest harnesses for heavy pulling, because it distributed the weight more evenly around the animals' shoulders. It was probably invented in China by the 6th century CE (possibly earlier) but didn't make it to Europe until the early tenth century.

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E3%83%95%E3%82%A1%E3%82%A4%E3%83%AB:Medieval_horse_team.jpg

Sources of Information

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_the_Middle_Ages

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidesaddle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horses_in_warfare

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horse_gait

http://www.horsesciencenews.com/horseback-riding/how-much-weight-can-a-horse-carry.php

http://www.ehow.com/about_5399073_history-horse-harnesses.html

http://asianhistory.about.com/od/asianinventions/a/Invention-Of-The-Stirrup.htm

http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blhorseshoe.htm

 

When is A Novel Really Finished?

I attended  my first writer's workshop recently. I met some phenomenal people and received (and hopefully gave) some useful advice and feedback about writing. One thing that two different authors mentioned is that a writer needs to know when it's time to finish his or her current novel and send it out into the world. In writing terms, this means to start querying your manuscript and to start in on a new project. This is a vital question for me, because by nature, I'm intellectually monogamous. I have a heck of a time working on more than one major writing project at a time. Revising and refining Umbral Heretic this summer has prevented me from writing any short stories, seriously starting another novel, or even writing entries for this blog regularly.

So, is Umbral Heretic done? Is anything ever really done? The short answer, of course, is no.

Writers are never completely satisfied with what they have written and with good reason. There is always something you can change about a plot thread or character that would ostensibly strengthen the work. The story you put down on a page will never be as deep, beautiful and profound as the one in your head ( a couple different authors said this at the workshop last weekend). And of course, there are those annoying sentences and paragraphs that never seem polished enough, no matter what. I am a perfectionist, so going back and reading something I wrote as recently as an hour ago, can make my toes curl in agony.

Then there is the sometimes conflicting feedback we get from our critiquing partners. What if two of your trusted sources disagree greatly about a turn of phrase, element of your world building, scene, character or even an entire plot thread? Who do you trust if you're undecided yourself? That nasty little voice of doubt will never go away completely, and all writers have a tendency to think that something they wrote a while ago and then came back to is rubbish.

So how do you know if it's really ready in spite of all your misgivings? The answer, of course, is you don't ever know for sure, at least not until/unless a prestigious publisher offers you a lucrative contract and the book actually does well in sales. Even then, I suspect, writers wonder if they could have done better. The best thing you can do is get some people who know something about writing and storytelling and the market you are aiming for to read the thing the way they would a novel and give you honest feedback. 

Their sharp eyes will pick out those clumsy passages, confusing timelines and plot threads that don't tie themselves off satisfactorily. They will also tell you if a character is bugging them in a way he or she is not supposed to be bugging them, and they can tell you whether the timing and pacing and causality of events makes sense to them. And hopefully, they can give you some ideas about how to fix the things that are fixable and whether the things they dislike that you can't fix would be possible deal breakers to most readers. Since they are reading the novel in its entirety, and not just chapter by chapter, they may be able to spot things that you the author and the initial set of critiquing buddies were too close to see.

My novel is complete, and I think, ready to send to some beta readers. Once that process is over (barring very discouraging news), it will be time to start querying it. As much as I've been working towards this goal for the past year, the notion scares the hell out of me--and not just because of my hatred of query writing or because of the poo-flinging doubt monkeys that live inside my head.

I've spent the last year creating, refining, thinking about, obsessing over, dreaming about, and dare I say it, loving my characters and their world. They feel like friends to me. Soon, I will have to say goodbye to them and move on to a new project. This is necessary for me as a writer, since I've probably learned and grown just about as much as I can from this novel. It is also necessary, because in the end, I don't want to put all my eggs in UH's basket. Even if it is phenomenal for a first novel, the odds of any one piece of work being published are far from good. Failure will be less demoralizing if I've managed to publish some short stories and am halfway through a new novel.

 But when I send Jarrod and Tesk out into the world to stand or fall on their own merits (or really on my merits as the writer I was when I created them and their story), I will miss them terribly. Even if I write a sequel someday, my relationship with them will be very different.

Homing Pigeons: Better than FedX?

     

    I've been distracted the past few weeks, but thought it was time I make another entry. Since this blog is entitled "doggedly writing," and since I do enjoy pretty much everything that has anything to do with dogs, I was thinking of coming up with something clever (or at least something) that related to the art of inserting dogs into works of fiction. I started researching the ways animals have been used in warfare and found a lot of interesting stuff about war dogs, but then I got sidetracked by something shiny (this is par for the course with me). So the Jennings dog and Sergeant Stubbs will have to wait. This week, I'm writing about messenger pigeons.

            Messenger birds do come into fantasy fiction sometimes. I make a couple of references to them in my own novel, so I thought it might be nice to have a better idea how these birds have been used to send messages throughout history so that my treatment of them will be more accurate.

            Messenger (or carrier) pigeons are specially bred members of the same species (Columba livia) of "rock dove pigeon" that we see befouling statues in large cities. These birds mate for life and have a remarkable ability to find their way back to their home nest over long distances and unfamiliar terrain. Over thousands of years, pigeon fanciers have created a special breed of these birds that are capable of flying hundreds of miles in a day at average speeds well in excess of 50 miles per hour and that can carry up to 75 grams.

            Research suggests that these birds normally use a combination of visual cues and will use landmarks, when in familiar terrain, and the angle and polarization of sunlight calibrated against their internal clock when unfamiliar terrain. Olfaction also appears to play a role in their navigational abilities, which is interesting, because birds are generally thought to have a poor sense of smell. Most intriguingly, birds that are hooded or blinded are also able to find their ways home. The discovery of iron containing short nerve branches in the upper beaks of these birds provides a possible clue as to how they are able to detect the magnetic field of the Earth.

            After reading all this, I don't think I'll ever look at those messy birds crowding city squares in quite the same way again. There is still a lot we don't know about how pigeons' nervous systems decode and interpret magnetic data, but people have been taking advantage of, and honing, these remarkable abilities for millennia. The Egyptians and Persians were using messenger pigeons 3000 years ago, so it is certainly well within the technological capability of any fantasy world to have a messenger bird service.

            Like anything else, there are limitations to the use of carrier pigeons, however. As a rule, they only carry messages one way--back to their home coop. So to use messenger birds, they must first be transported to a desired location via overland or sea travel, and kept in cages. When you need one to carry a message back to its home coop, you write a message on thin, light paper, attach it to a tube on one of the bird's legs and release it. Of course, what this means is that you want to have the capability of sending and receiving messages between many locations, you will need a large number of pigeon coops. In fact, at the Marne during World War I, the French troops had 72 pigeon lofts, which they advanced with their troops.

            Evidently, there have been a few cases where birds were trained to carry messages in two directions over relatively short distances. This was achieved by feeding the birds in a location away from their home coop. So messages could be attached to birds that were flying away to feed and then the same birds could carry messages back to their home coop later.

Some interesting carrier pigeon trivia:

-modern racing pigeons have been clocked at speeds of 92 miles per hour in 400 mile races. Birds can fly in excess of 100 mph for shorter distances.

-They can fly up to 700 miles in a day.

-Homing pigeons were used in both world wars

-pigeons are still used today by the French, Israeli and Iraqi armies.

-they were used in the gulf war, because they are immune to electronic jamming

-they can live for over 30 years

-in the 1800's, a pigeon flew from Africa to England in 55 days, a distance of over 7000 miles.

-32 pigeons have received the Dickin medal, the highest medal available to animals in the UK.

-Between 1977-1983, two English hospitals used carrier pigeons to transport laboratory specimens.

-During WWI, A carrier pigeon named Cher Ami delivered a message in spite of having his foot shot off. The message saved a group of American soldiers who were surrounded. This bird was awarded the Criox de Guerre medal.

-pigeons were used to carry aerial reconnaissance cameras during WWII.

-Modern pigeon races can have purses in excess of $600,000

-The Taliban banned the keeping or use of carrier pigeons in Afghanistan.

-Pigeons were used to announce the winners of the Olympics in ancient Greece.

 

Cher Ami: WWI Pigeon Hero

Transit of Venus, 2012

No words of wisdom to impart today, but I do have a couple of pictures I took of the last transit of Venus that will occur in more than 120 years. Venus orbits the sun more rapidly than we do, and so it crosses from one side of the sun to the other quite frequently, from our perspective here on Earth. However, the alignment of the Earth, Venus and the sun only allow us to actually see the disc of Venus crossing the sun's surface quite rarely, in a pattern that repeats every 243 years. Visible transits occur in pairs, eight years apart. Then a gap of either 105 years or 121 years will occur before the next pair. Today's transit was the second (the first occurred in 2004) of the current pair. The next pair won't occur until December of 2117 and December of 2125.

The top image was taken (with my smartphone camera) via a reflective viewer (called a sunspotter), while the second one was taken through a Dobsonian telescope with a mylar solar filter at Sac City College today. The second picture looks like it is "upside down" because telescopes invert their images (and I didn't flip the picture around the way I did the top one). You can also see some sunspots in the picture if you zoom in a bit.