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apropos of the previous post

George R. R. Martin has an announcement.

As a professional, this is fascinating to me. They have set a publication date of July — in this year — for a book he says he isn’t done with yet. By contrast, I finished With Fate Conspire in September of last year, did copy-edits in January, and will be getting page proofs in March, for a street date at the end of August. I know the reasons for that schedule, and in no way begrudge them; a lot of factors go into determining what gets done when. But it’s fascinating to see how quickly it can all go, when the publisher decides to push.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Path of Daggers

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

After reading A Crown of Swords, I found myself realizing that I organize the series into four generalized groupings, based on the narrative momentum. It begins with the Good Four, which are The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, The Dragon Reborn, and The Shadow Rising. Each has its flaws, but on the whole, they’re the books in which the scope and complexity of the story manages to be a feature rather than a bug. They’re followed by the Wobbly Three — The Fires of Heaven, Lord of Chaos, and A Crown of Swords — during which, as I’ve documented in past posts, the structural decisions made during the Good Four start to have destabilizing consequences for the pacing and shape of the narrative. Those three do still achieve interesting forward progress on the plot, though, despite their increasingly swampy nature.

This month, however, we start in on the Bad Three: The Path of Daggers, Winter’s Heart, and (god help me) Crossroads of Twilight.

The boundary between the Wobbly Three and the Bad Three is indistinct, and may well owe its placement to the fact that I had to wait two years for The Path of Daggers to come out. I don’t entirely think so, though. It seems to me that, although we’ve been running into increasing structural problems since TFoH, this is the first time that the shape of an individual volume has fallen like a badly-made souffle. There’s no arc to this book, no feeling of growing tension or climax at the end. The most exciting stuff happens around pages 100-150 and 300-350, but the book is 591 pages long. The actual ending coasts along mildly for a time before saying without warning, “oh, by the way, some shit,” and then you’re left staring at the Epilogue.

This gets, um, very ranty. I told you I call these the Bad Three, right?

a better use for this icon

You know that poll I did before, on what kind of waiting is best?

This kind is — the kind where I’m waiting to share interesting news with you guys. Because really, then I’m making you wait, with my cryptic posts and all. Offloading the irritation, as it were. Much better than hanging in limbo myself, don’t you agree?

What? Why are you glaring at me like that?

^_^

Books read, February 2011

Continuing my quest to read all the fiction!

Seriously, I have read more fiction in the first two months of this year than in the entirety of last year — possibly the last two years. (Presuming we don’t count all the Victorian lit I speed-read while hunting for a title, and really, we shouldn’t count it, because that stuff was going in one eyeball and out the other.) Eventually these posts will include some nonfiction, but for now, I am wallowing in made-up stories, and it is glorious.

I averaged a book every two days, though admittedly, some of them are novellas.

DIE YOU STUPID THING DIE

HAH. I have ridden from Stamford Bridge to Hastings in six days written 6,410 words today and KILLED THE NOVELLA DEAD.

Apparently February is my month for writing novellas. Deeds of Men was written two years ago. I kind of hope it’s another two years before — or longer — before I try to write another one.

today’s dose of gaming geekery

Courtesy of lunch with my husband, I give you The Lion in Winter (preferentially the Peter O’Toole and Katherine Hepburn version), with the characters re-cast as Changeling sidhe of various Houses:

  • Henry — Gwydion. The rage says it all.
  • Eleanor — Fiona, most likely; one of them has to be, to explain their screwed-up marriage.
  • Richard — also Fiona. Philip, plus “When the fall is all there is, it matters.”
  • Geoffrey — Ailil. Naturally. He’s a cold-blooded scheming bastard.
  • John — this one is hard. Tongue-in-cheek, he’s a Dougal; he made that little headsman toy, and clearly his physical defect is his brain. As kniedzw said, though, “I respect the Dougal too much for that.” Problem is, we respect all the Houses and kiths too much for that.
  • Alais — Liam, maybe. On account of being stepped on by everybody around her.
  • Philip — Eiluned. Mostly because I can’t tell when he’s lying and when he’s telling the truth in the bedroom scene, and neither, I think, can Henry.

I do love a good title

Congratulations to my friend Von Carr, whose short story “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” placed second in the Intergalactic Medicine Show readers’ awards. You can read the whole thing at that link; it’s a humorous post-apocalypses* tale featuring a heavily armed nun as the main character. What more need be said?

(All of the winning stories are available until April, I think, if you want to see what else won.)

*Yes, I meant that to be plural. To quote the story: “In the old days people had — maybe — worried about one apocalypse. At most, two. Global Warming and an ice age. Vampires and zombies. Nobody had expected all of the apocalypses to happen at once.”

I should have posted this on Valentine’s Day. (Or not.)

So in my SF Novelists post, I made a mention of how a lot of romance novels don’t work for me because they’re often too focused on the hero and heroine, to the exclusion (or at least sidelining) of other characters. And that reminded me that I had some thoughts I’d meant to post, about why, despite giving it a good shot, I don’t think I’ll ever be a romance reader.

Before I get into those thoughts, however, let me say up front: the tl;dr version of this is not “romance novels suck.” Anyone using the comment thread to bash the genre wholesale will be invited to do their bashing elsewhere. This is about why I’m the wrong reader for the genre.

The reason, in short form, is this: I don’t find them all that romantic.

It has to do with where my own personal buttons are.

another month at SF Novelists

Man, I’m having a much harder time remembering to think up topics for my SF Novelists posts (and get them written on time) now that I’ve stopped doing the “writing women” series. Anyway, this month I muse on ensemble casts, and why I like them.

As usual, comment over there; no reg required, though if you’re a first-time commenter I’ll have to fish it out of the moderation queue.

while I wait . . . .

Me, I prefer open-ended waiting, because then I can generally put the subject from my mind and move on to other things. But if I’ve been given a timetable, then I’m constantly distracted, and I get nothing done.

Yes, I’m waiting for something right now. Yes, I’ve been told it will happen sometime soonish. How did you guess?

Writing Fight Scenes: Where?

[This is a post in my series on how to write fight scenes. Other installments may be found under the tag.]

My apologies for the hiatus; I’ve been busy, and this is another one of those posts that requires me to pull together a bunch of things I don’t normally think about consciously, ergo requires more brain-power than I was able to muster for a while there. But let’s get back on the wagon, and ask ourselves the next important question: where are the combatants fighting?

As with the question of who’s fighting, this often has a simple answer that turns out to have more packed inside it than you might think. Unpacking that can be useful for two reasons: first, well-placed description can bring the scene to life for the reader, and second, it can influence the course of the fight.

So, what aspects might you want to consider in setting your scene?

Y'all really need to read Dunnett, if you haven't.

why, brain, why?

So I’m hauling laundry out of the dryer, and my brain randomly decides it wants to distract itself from the tedium by figuring out how to hack an RPG system to run a Wheel of Time game.

I have no intention of actually running a Wheel of Time game, mind you. But as I said to kniedzw, I think it’s the fanfic impulse gone sideways; there’s stuff I really like about the setting, but also stuff that really annoys me, and a game would give me a way to mentally inhabit my preferred version of that world — maybe even critiquing it in passing. I have no concept for such a game, and probably nobody to play in it anyway (since it would go best with people who know the series), but every so often my brain likes to play with mechanics, and today was one of those times.

Yeah, sure, there’s already a rulebook for it. It’s d20, people. Which may be the Official System for Epic Fantasy Gaming — but it’s abysmally unsuited to handle the magic paradigm presented in the novels. Anybody with an interest in system hacks or running their own Wheel of Time game is invited behind the cut to see how I would do it.

There's more than one solution, I'm sure. But I like mine.

tickets make it official

日本に行くよ!

Having bought the plane tickets yesterday, I can now say with confidence that kniedzw and I are going to Japan!

I’ve been once before, briefly (over spring break my senior year of college); he’s never been. We’ll be heading down to Kyushu, where kurayami_hime is currently living, then enjoying about a week and a half of sightseeing in Kyushu and western Honshu. Our exact plans haven’t yet been nailed down, but are shaping up to include Nagasaki, Kyoto, and points in between.

If you’re familiar with that area, feel free to recommend things in the comments: sights to see, hotels or ryokan to stay in, etc. We’ll be there during Golden Week, so this will need to be the kind of trip that’s planned in advance, with reservations secured ahead of time.

(True story: when I was in Japan before, I arrived right when cherry blossoms were blooming in the Kansai region. kurayami_hime and I had vaguely planned to stay in Kyoto for three nights, starting on a Wednesday, but when we got to the city and went to make a reservation at a ryokan, there was a sign above the desk warning us “NO VACANCIES IN KYOTO FRIDAY OR SATURDAY NIGHTS.” The entire city was sold out. So we stayed two nights instead of three, and that’s how I ended up going to Takayama, which had not been on my original itinerary.)

Now I’d better get to work dusting off my language skills. It’s been a long time since I really tried to speak Japanese . . . .

downtime update

At this point, Swan Tower should be navigable again. This is not the same thing as pretty; there are various bits of formatting that need to be adjusted for the new layout, plus bad decisions of mine that were invisible in the old look but become glaringly, appallingly obvious (not to mention ugly) now that the background color has changed. It will take me some time to deal with those. But at least you can get at stuff again.

Perl help needed

I could use a spot of help from somebody who knows their way around Perl. The task at hand is to write a reliable script that can do a multi-line replacement across multiple files in multiple subdirectories — to take X (longish) chunk of text and swap Y chunk into its place.

If you’ve got the skills to do that, and the free time to do it in the next day or so, please drop me an email at marie -dot- brennan -at- gmail -dot- com.

IMPENDING DOWNTIME

Since this blog is hosted separately from my website, the number of people this will directly affect is probably small, but:

Swan Tower (the website, not the journal) is about to get a major face-lift. As in, probably today. Please disregard the dust, hammering noises, and falling support beams that may occur during the process. I’ll post again here when it’s safe to venture back inside.

I’ve missed this

You know what I love about reading fiction?

I can do it while walking places.

For the last four years, a large proportion of my reading has been nonfiction, most of it research for the Onyx Court. Which requires my attention to follow complex sentences and complicated arguments, and often I end up taking notes: not very compatible with strolling down the sidewalk. But if the book in my hands is a Dorothy Sayers mystery? I can jaunt off to the grocery store, no problem, and not feel annoyed that the walk is taking up valuable time, because I’m entertaining myself as I go.

No doubt whatever I write next will require some amount of research. But until then, I’m going to do my very best to read ALL the fiction.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: A Crown of Swords

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after Crossroads of Twilight, as that’s the last book I read before starting this project.]

Back in the day, I think A Crown of Swords was my favorite book in the series. As I’ve said before, it’s the one I waited the right length of time for (enough to build anticipation, not enough to become annoyed); furthermore, it has a lot of Mat, and also some really good moments for both Elayne and Nynaeve. In retrospect, it isn’t as good as The Shadow Rising — which will probably remain the best-constructed slice of this sprawling narrative, unless Sanderson really knocks my socks off — but it’s okay. Its major weakness is probably the fizzle of confrontation at the end. (A lot of people apparently complain about how little time passes during the book, but a) man, that must take obsessive work to figure out, since there are no dates given and b) I don’t care about time so much as plot elapsed. And while this one is firmly in the throes of “too many new plots, not enough resolution,” stuff does happen.)

I’ll get to the plot construction in a minute, but first: exciting news! I think I’ve figured out Faile. But I need other people to check my characterization math, because I don’t have a copy of Lord of Chaos around to see if I’m correctly remembering her behavior there, and I don’t remember what happens later well enough (especially the bits from Faile’s pov).

Follow me behind the cut . . . .