April was another month where I was terrible about recording things, and then never even got around to posting about it. But the good news is, I remembered another book from January, which is the previous time I forgot to record stuff! So this post is mostly but not entirely from May.
Over the weekend, the Chains and Memory Kickstarter reached its first stretch goal. This means that every backer, current or yet to come, will also be receiving the next best thing to me sharing the novel soundtrack itself: a discussion of the “score” I made for Lies and Prophecy, with links to the songs where possible.
I’m looking forward to putting that together. The first song on the list is basically the reason I make novel soundtracks at all: I listened to it a bunch while writing the first draft of the novel, which caused it to become associated with the story in my mind, and then I leveraged that to help me get in the mood for writing, which led to me making playlists for books and so onward to the actual, formal score-type-thing. I love having the story in musical form; it adds another layer to how I perceive the characters and events. And now I can share that with other people!
Now, of course, it’s on to Stretch Goal #2: Short Story. The most likely prospect is that I’ll write about Henry Welton during First Manifestation — the days when half the planet suddenly had psychic powers and no idea how to control them. It’s possible something else will suggest itself while I’m drafting Chains and Memory, though. Speaking of which: I’ve started work on it, and am now a little more than 7K in, counting some material that got written beforehand. That puts me on track to finish it before October 4th, with time off for being in Okinawa and having ankle surgery, with a bit of a cushion to spare. Fingers crossed that things continue to go well.
Most of you have probably seen in one or more places already that Jay Lake passed away, after a long . . .
I don’t actually know how to finish that sentence. The usual phrase is “battle with cancer,” but Jay had opinions on that metaphor and its flaws. I remember him noting that it would be more precise to say he was the battlefield of cancer.
Last December I sent him an email with a link to a song that made me think of him. The email was much larded about with warnings that the song was about death, and I would totally understand if that was something he thought about enough already; I had no way of judging whether this would be of interest to him or one straw too many. He wrote back to say he did indeed like the song, which I had described as sort of “an atheist anthem about the afterlife.” Jay was a committed atheist — he had no belief that he would persist after he died — but this is an afterlife I think he could believe in:
But I place one foot before the other, confident because
I know that everything we are right now is everything that was
(Full lyrics here.)
I didn’t know Jay nearly as well as many of the people memorializing him today. I met him at ICFA and hung out with him there on several occasions; I showed up to various dinners and such when he came to the Bay Area, or would say hi to him in passing at conventions. Diana Sherman and I once chased him through a room party at World Fantasy describing the anthology concept we’d had over dinner, until he suddenly turned and began declaiming ex tempore the epic charge of the war elephants across the fields of Gettysburg. (Another reason to be sad Jay is gone: we never did get that anthology off the ground, and if it happens eventually it will not have the title story from Jay that it deserved.) He had an expansive personality, boundless energy, and a faster wit than probably any human being I’ve ever met.
Cancer is a thief, taking those things from Jay, from all of us. If you want to do something for Jay, and for what he fought for, make a donation here:
Clayton Memorial Medical Fund
c/o OSFCI
P.O. Box 5703
Portland, Oregon 97228
Jay is gone, but he is remembered; he remains.
Five updates make a post . . . .
1) The Chains and Memory Kickstarter is a bit over halfway to the first stretch goal. The pace of progress has (unsurprisingly) slowed down; I welcome any signal boosting, and/or suggestions for other things I could do to spread the word.
2) While Mary and I were on tour earlier this month, Tor sent a camera crew to film our Portland event and interview us afterward. It was a fascinating experience; this wasn’t the “sit and have a conversation in front of the camera” kind of thing, but rather raw material for the following video:
If you’d like a sense of what our events were like, check it out!
3) Driftwood fans take note: I’ve sold the audio rights for “The Ascent of Unreason” to Podcastle.
4) My SF Novelists post for this month was “Pleaser Don’t Doed Thising”, in which I take aim at Bad Fantasy Latin, Bad Fantasy Japanese, and other such linguistic sins.
5) WisCon! I went. It was a thing.
Sorry, that’s just the tiredness talking. Going to WisCon was a good idea; going right after being on tour, less so. I feel like I didn’t take full advantage of the experience, partly because I was going easy on myself, partly because I’m new to the con’s culture and therefore didn’t know in advance about things like the Floomp. It was fun, though: lots of interesting people, some good panels (and some I really wish had dug further into their topics), some &@#$! awesome GoH speeches, etc. The good news is, now I know what to expect and can get more out of it in future years. Will I be back in 2015? Dunno; I’ll have to look at my schedule. But I do intend to be back eventually.
As of about ten minutes ago, I am (finally) a member of SFWA.
I’ve been eligible to join since 2004, when I sold my first novel. But back then I was a starving graduate student, for whom the membership fee was a non-trivial expense . . . and soon thereafter, SFWA began shooting itself very publicly and head-deskingly in the foot, not just once, but several times in a row. Its forums were legendary for their toxicity, the org as a whole was run by people who hadn’t been working professionals in the field for years, and while some may have had good intentions, SFWA was not doing a very effective job of coping with the realities of modern publishing. Why should I pay money I didn’t really have to call myself one of them? The answers people gave me basically fell into two categories: 1) “Griefcom and the EMF are good things and worth supporting!” and 2) “Join and be the change you want to see!” While I had no disagreement with #1 (the Grievance Committee advocates for authors in disputes with their publishers or agents, and the Emergency Medical Fund assists writers without health insurance), #2 got up my nose something fierce. Oh, yes, let me give you money for the privilege of trying to reform a group that shows no signs of wanting to reform. Where do I sign up?
But things got better. Actual working novelists and short story writers stepped up to run for election and, well, did what I wasn’t willing to do: dragged the org kicking and screaming toward a better future. Members who weren’t toxic layabouts raised their heads and went “oh, thank god, I’m not alone.” SFWA’s officers did yeoman work during the whole business with Night Shade’s ongoing implosion. Incidents that would have been allowed to slide ten years ago started to be called out.
It still isn’t perfect. SFWA has its share of dinosaurs and reactionaries, and they don’t always get rebuked as fast or as effectively as they should. But it’s improving, and then there was this thing, and I said to myself, “Self, I want to be one of those people Scalzi et al. brought in.” He isn’t president anymore, but the truth is that he and his cohort — people like Mary Robinette Kowal and Rachel Swirsky — are the ones who changed my thinking about SFWA. I actually meant to join after that happened . . . but I got busy, and I forgot. Fortunately (for suitably flexible values of “fortunately”), the sexist racist homophobic assholes of the speculative fiction field are the gift that keeps on giving. Two weeks ago, when John C. Wright was spreading his revisionist history around the web and various people were debunking him as he deserved, I got off my posterior and joined.
So there you have it: I am officially a member of the Insect Army — which is to say, SFWA, The 21st Century Edition. I will try to use my newfound powers for good.
As many of you may have noticed, I am a fan of historical fantasy and historical-adjacent fantasy — by which I mean, stories taking place in settings clearly modeled on a real period and place, but technically a secondary world. (In other words, the kind of thing the Memoirs are.) I like this sort of novel a great deal.
But.
I find myself craving stuff that isn’t quite so tied to reality. Secondary-world fantasy in which invention can fly more freely. I don’t mean that it has to be so wacky and out there that it bears no resemblance to anything we know; things like Elizabeth Bear’s Eternal Sky books are fine, because while the cultures are clearly inspired by Central Asian sources, they also have lots of imaginative details unrelated to real history. But further out is also good. I want worlds where humans rub shoulders with sentient non-human creatures. I want cosmologies that don’t obey our rules. I also — and this is a more specific and directed part of the current craving — want settings where the tech level isn’t generically medievalish, but has printing presses and guns or things that are like printing presses or guns but operate in different ways and occupy not quite the same role and are powered by magic or whatever instead. (Because this notion that high fantasy and technology are antithetical is bollocks.)
Things I do not want: grimdark epic fantasy. China Mieville (I’ve bounced off too much of his work.) Brandon Sanderson (ditto.) Anything else is good, though: adult, YA, comic books, humorous, dramatic, stand-alone novels, series, etc. I feel like I need to feed my brain with some stranger stuff than it’s been getting lately.
Recommend things to me?
Just a heads-up to say that I am aware of the difficulties with the WP installation of this journal, and am working on fixing them. If you want to comment on or link to any of my posts, then for the time being the Livejournal mirror is the way to go.
I’m pleased to announce the winners of the Design Your Own Dragon contest!
Choosing the winning entries was much harder than I anticipated. Some of the criteria were straightforward; for example, the concept had to be one which fit into the paradigm of dragons in Isabella’s world, but did not duplicate too closely something already described in the series. (My apologies to those of you whose entries resembled breeds that will be appearing in Voyage of the Basilisk. You had no way of knowing those particular niches were already filled.) After I filtered for that, though, I still had quite a few possibilities. Then it was a matter of considering which ones could be most easily incorporated into the later books, which is easier said than done.
In the end, I narrowed it down to two winners. Without further ado, I give you: Yubin Kim’s honeyseeker, and Kate Parkinson’s Mrtyahaiman mew!
HONEYSEEKERS are nectar-loving arboreal creatures that thrive in eucalyptus forests. Typically 12~14 cm long, Honeyseekers are light-bodied with broad, manoeuvrable wings and a prehensile tail which allow them to cling to thin flowering branches, where they soak up nectar with their brush tipped tongue. During winter when blooms are scarce, Honeyseekers supplement their diet with insects caught with their clever foreclaws.
The species display sexual dimorphism and while the females are a drab muddy green, the males sport glittering black and yellow scales and a sapphire-blue crest. The males build nests and display to attract females, who then mate with those they judge worthy and leave after laying a single egg. When a sufficient number of eggs are gathered, the males incubate and raise the young alone.
When threatened, Honeyseekers breath a noxious spray in the eyes of the predator, a concentrate of toxins gathered from their close association with the eucalyptus. The Honeyseekers are thought to play a large role in the lifecycle of the tree and some blame them for the invasive spread of eucalyptus which are beginning replacing oak woodlands in certain forests.
MYRTYAHAIMAN MEW
A small drake measuring no more than thirty centimetres at the shoulder, this species is called the ‘noisy trickster’ by locals, as well as epithets not appropriate to repeat. Although they meet all other criteria, mews do not have any special property to their breath and are thus classified as draconic cousins rather than true drakes. Their name derives from their distinctive call which resembles the mew of a cat.
Mews are typically black with bronze tones to their scales, although brown and even albino specimens have been noted. Flocks of up to thirty individuals have been sighted but they are most often seen in groups of three or four. They are intelligent and resourceful creatures and are often attracted to human settlements, where they pillage shiny objects and scavenge through rubbish pits and middens. This behaviour has sometimes led to them becoming unpopular with humans.
Mews love fatty foods and have been known to land on the back of sheep to pick out pieces of flesh. There are legends of mews stampeding flocks of sheep or goats over cliffs to feast upon the remains, though this has never been reliably documented.
A gathering of mews is called a festival.
My thanks to everyone who participated; it was a lot of fun seeing what you all came up with!
The one bright spot is, people are starting to notice.
In 2008, Amazon got into a pissing contest with Hachette, the smallest of the large publishers (and owners of Orbit, who published my first four novels). In 2010, it was Macmillan (owners of Tor, my current publisher). In 2012, Penguin. And now, in 2014, we’ve wrapped back around to Hachette. Books published by subsidaries of Hachette are currently shipping “in 2 to 5 weeks” — including Warrior, Witch, Midnight Never Come, and In Ashes Lie. Is it because there’s a problem with Hachette? Are they not supplying stock to Amazon in a timely fashion?
Nope. It’s because Amazon is trying, once again, to use its market share to strong-arm publishers into accepting unfavorable terms. Unfavorable for the publishers, unfavorable for writers — and ultimately, unfavorable for readers.
This isn’t an isolated incident. It’s an ongoing pattern of behavior. It’s something people have been warning about for years, but the response has usually been that Amazon is your friend. They sell things cheaply and ship really fast (just don’t think about how they treat their employees), and hey, 70% royalties on ebooks! Except that Amazon is demonstrably willing to tank the customer experience if it will help them gain more power in the marketplace. And the more they control, the less friendly they become. They are the abusive boyfriend who systematically isolates you from everybody in your life and then, once you have nowhere else to turn, shows his true colors.
If we had better anti-trust legislation in this country, Amazon would have been stopped long before this. But we don’t, and they haven’t been.
Back when they pulled the buy buttons off Macmillan books as a “negotiating tool,” I removed the Amazon links from my website. (Mostly. Scanning the pages, I see I left the Book Depository there; I don’t know if they hadn’t yet been bought by Amazon at the time.) I’m going to go through and scrub the remainder, with two exceptions: Audible (also owned by Amazon, but they are the publisher of my audio editions) and Kindle Direct Publishing (for the BVC-published ebooks). Notice a pattern there? I’m leaving up the links where Amazon has enough power over me that I can’t just walk away from them. I don’t like it, but I don’t feel I can choose differently. More than half of my ebook sales come via Amazon, and there is no way to buy the audiobooks that doesn’t put money in their pocket.
But they don’t control everything, at least not yet. You can get my books from Barnes and Noble — ebook and print alike. They aren’t perfect, but they’re Amazon’s main competitor. Or you can buy from Powell’s. Or from IndieBound. Or Books-a-Million. Or Indigo, if you’re Canadian. You can also get my ebooks from Book View Cafe or Kobo (and by the way, if you’re the sort of person who’s motivated by Amazon’s “author-friendly” habit of paying a 70% royalty, note that Kobo pays the same, while BVC pays me a 95% royalty instead). Maybe it won’t be as convenient as Amazon; you won’t get free two-day shipping. But that convenience is the bait: they use it to shift more and more business into their hands, and then they use what they hold to change the market to benefit them.
It isn’t illegal. But it also isn’t something I care to support. There are alternatives, and I encourage you to use them.
(You have no idea how tempted I was to title this “Ni Presentas . . . Goal!” You have no idea mostly because I’m not sure whether anybody reading this blog even knows why the heck I would be tempted to say that in the first place.)
So, that Kickstarter I’m running? It made goal this morning. I woke up way earlier than I wanted to, because I had to drag myself to the airport for my Wiscon flight, and lo and behold: I found myself funded. In fact, we’re at $2060 right now.
Which is, in a word, refrackulawesome.
And if you’re familiar with Kickstarter, you know what that means: stretch goals! I have 25 days to go before this thing ends, so I might as well see how far we can go. If we hit $2500, I will share with all backers “The Music of Lies and Prophecy” — the track listing for the novel, with links to the songs (where possible) and notes on how and why I chose them. (I would share the soundtrack itself, but, um, copyright violations up the wazoo.) And if we hit $3000, I’ll write a short story in the setting!
If we go beyond that . . . well, you’ll just have to wait and see. 🙂
So if those sound tempting, you can mosey on over and back the project yourself. Or if you’ve already done that, spread the word to some friends! The more, the merrier.
Fourteen and a half years ago, I completed the first draft of what at the time I thought was a stand-alone novel: Lies and Prophecy.
Within a year or two, though, I started getting Ideas. Fragments of ideas, anyway — bits and pieces about what would happen to Kim and Julian after the end of that novel. They piled up, and fed back into later drafts of Lies and Prophecy, until here we are more than a decade later, and those ideas have formed a can-can line and are performing choreographed routines in my head.
So I’ve decided to Kickstart them into reality.
My aim, if I meet my funding goal, is to draft the sequel of Chains and Memory this summer, while I’m doing the prep work for the fourth Memoir. In pursuit of that, I am offering a variety of book packages, plus other rewards like behind-the-scenes reports, t-shirts, tarot readings, and even the chance to appear as a character in the novel. Head on over to Kickstarter to check out the full list; it will be running for the next four weeks.
You can also help me immensely by spreading the word! Whether it’s on a blog, or Twitter, or Facebook, or messages stuffed into bottles and dropped into the sea, any and all signal-boosting would be absolutely wonderful. I’ll be posting more information here over the next few weeks, and if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to ask.
You have no idea how excited I am about this. 😀
I am croggled to discover that Zelazny’s Nine Princes in Amber is apparently not available as an ebook (not commercially, anyway — my library seems to only have it in electronic format). Furthermore, if I wish to purchase the dead tree edition new, my only option seems to be buying an enormous honkin’ omnibus of all ten main novels.
I would welcome evidence that I am wrong about this, likely on account of searching when it is nearly 3 a.m. here and I need sleep. But if it is indeed as it appears: what the heck? Why has the rights-holder not made the book more widely available? This is not some obscure novel nobody’s ever heard of except academics and three Yuletide fans; it’s a reasonably well-known classic. I want to give the rights-holder money, whoever they are. But they are making it annoying to do so. I don’t want a giant omnibus; I want the instant gratification of an ebook, which I can take with me to Wiscon, and then if I like the first one I’ll probably buy it and the rest in paper. I do not want to carry a brick on the plane.
Grrr. Argh.
My most recent gem of WordPress spam:
Write more, thats all I have to say. Literally, it seems
as though you relied on the video to make your point. You obviously know what
youre talking about, why throw away your intelligence on just posting videos to your site when you could be giving us something informative to read?
Indeed. My problem is that I don’t write enough — I’m just throwing my intelligence away.
Possibly the easiest way for me to encapsulate the character I talked about in a previous post is by linking you to this song.
It’s an amazing remix all on its own. I love the way it builds, wave-like: it keeps climbing and then receding, stepping back to a quieter level when you expect it to bust out in full Linkin Park screamo yelling. 😛 But more than that, it fit beautifully with Ree at the pivotal moment of her story, the brink of her metamorphosis from the broken, lost thing she had been for eons back to her original self. “I’ve felt this way before” . . . she’d been shattered, and had tried to piece herself back together — thought she had succeeded — but then during the course of the game she was shattered again, falling back to square one, so far from her goal it was almost impossible for her to believe that she was actually closer to it than ever. “Against my will I stand beside my own reflection” . . . she sold half her soul to someone else, not realizing that was what she was doing, and she had to reclaim it. “Without a sense of confidence, I’m convinced that there’s just too much pressure to take” . . . the problem with her Seelie side was that it had too much confidence, without the fatalism of her Unseelie half to temper it, which is how she got broken again, and then the symbolism of the diamond and pressure over time pretty much guaranteed I had to use this song. This was Ree at her lowest point, one step away from victory, and the tension that builds throughout this evokes those days perfectly in my mind. There’s more to it than one song, but I can point to the song and say, this. This is why I can’t forget her story.
When I make soundtracks for characters, or for games I run, or for novels, many of the songs are filler. They go in because I want the whole story in music, and so I pick the best matches I can; in the really good soundtracks, even the filler is pretty solid. But this? This is why I go to the effort. For the one or two or five songs that are the story, the ones that become so linked with the narrative that they end up feeding back into it, and it can be eight years later and hearing them still brings the story to life in my head. This is Galen walking into the chamber below the Monument. This is Dead Rick getting his memories back. Here’s the entire second half of Doppelganger, according to my half-dozing brain when I was in the middle of writing the book; I can quite literally map segments of the novel to the various stages in the music, because my subconscious had decided this was the outline it was writing to. (Much like what happened here, though that was on a smaller scale.)
It’s no accident that I also love film scores. Pairing music with story — turning music into story — is one of my favorite things. Since I’m not a composer, I have to settle for the mix-tape approach. Sometimes it works out very, very well.
Design Your Own Dragon ends tomorrow night! Get your entry in while the getting is good . . . .
Me, I’m home from tour. The fact that I am exceedingly glad to be back has more to do with the wear and tear of shifting from hotel to airport to cab to store than to do with the tour events themselves, which were splendid. Mary Robinette Kowal and I drew some pretty good crowds together, and it turns out we make for compatible traveling companions — which was by no means a guarantee! We’d met a couple of times before, at conventions and such, and of course our books make a good pairing with each other . . . but that didn’t necessarily mean we’d get along on the road. Despite Mary having her own hashtag for travel woes, I quite liked traveling with her. It turns out we see eye-to-eye on a number of fronts, ranging from fiction to how early we should get to the airport, and that’s valuable when you’re spending a week and a half together and suffering the aforementioned wear and tear.
Plus! There were costumes! And dragon bones!
I foolishly did not get anyone to take photos on my own phone, so rather than stealing other people’s pictures, I will link you to them. This report at A Truant Disposition shows the whole thing pretty well, from my dress and Mary’s to our respective song-and-dance bit (a mini puppet show on her part, a mini naturalist lecture on mine). Geeky Library has some more, and I quite like this photo from @ghostwritingcow on Twitter. The “dragon bones” are the thing I alluded to before the tour: Mary suggested I obtain replica dinosaur fossils from Skulls Unlimited, and use them as dragon substitutes. For the curious, the skull and the smaller claw are from a velociraptor, while the tooth is from a T-Rex and the larger claw is from a megaraptor. (The tiny skull, which I don’t think got photographed, is actually supposed to be a “dragon skull;” Mary picked it up at a natural history museum in Utah.)
Touring is a lot more fun in company, I have to say. Not only does it jazz up the event itself, by giving you somebody to riff off of, it does a lot to mitigate the “oh god I’m in another airport” drudgery of the travel itself. So props to Tor for putting us together, and I hope for a chance to do something like this again in the future.
We’re headed into the final stretch for Design Your Own Dragon, and I just wanted to clarify something one interested party asked about a few days ago:
You do get to keep the rights to your entry.
Which is to say, if I pick your dragon as a winner, I will have the non-exclusive right to use the concept (with modifications, if necessary) in the Memoirs of Lady Trent, in prose and/or visual form — but you retain all other rights. If you want to write own stories or make your own art about your dragon concept, you are entirely free to do so. You are not signing over your idea to me wholesale.
This was a question for at least one interested party, which means it may very well be a question for others as well. So if that was giving you any hesitation in entering, hopefully this clears things up in an acceptable fashion.
You’ve got until 11:59 p.m. Eastern Time on May 15th. I’ve got a lot of fun entries already, but there’s always room for more!
Interview first: I’m over at Adventures in Sci-Fi Publishing, talking about a whole host of stuff, ranging from The Tropic of Serpents to my essay on epic story structure to making up slang to about a dozen other things. Check out the link for a giveaway, too — either a copy of The Tropic of Serpents or a set of both books.
As for the contest, this is your one-week reminder; the deadline is coming up on May 15th. If you’d like to see your own dragon concept show up in the Memoirs of Lady Trent — not to mention read Voyage of the Basilisk before it comes out! — check out the guidelines and send in your entry!
I guess the work I did filing off the footnotes was worth it: “Comparison of Efficacy Rates for Seven Antipathetics As Employed Against Lycanthropes” is going to be recorded for Pseudopod.
In other news, the tour is going splendidly. I will have a fuller report next Monday or thereabouts, after I’m home.
The Book Bin in Salem, OR (where today’s event was held) has a lovely orange tabby cat named Rose Weasley. Naturally I made her acquaintance when I arrived, both while I was still in street clothes, and then again after getting into costume.
I did my bit — reading, passing around “dragon bones” — and then Mary got up to read. About two thirds of the way through her piece, Rose comes wandering by my chair. I offer her a few discreet pats, not wanting to distract anybody from Mary’s reading, and Rose sniffs inquisitively at the skirt and train of my dress. And then she decides to investigate this fascinating new cave she found.
Which is to say, she wanders under my skirts.
I’m sitting there attempting to keep a straight face — remember, Mary’s still reading; she doesn’t need me making a spectacle of myself behind her — while these odd little tugging sensations ripple through my petticoat, as Rose sniffs at things/steps on them/god knows what she was doing under there. Not attacking, I think, for which I am very grateful; there’s lots of dangling fabric that could easily have been interpreted as a cat toy. Off to my left, one of the store employees has seen the whole thing and is trying not to crack up. I manage to hold it together until Mary finishes, whereupon I share these fascinating developments with our audience, and ask whether Mary needs me to move out of the way of her puppet show. Fortunately her answer is “no,” because I’m kind of afraid that if I try to raise my skirts to evict the cat, she will decide my costume is her new toy. She seems happy to be settled against my left ankle for a time, and wanders out again before the puppet show is done.
If you someday read a book or story of mine in which a very proper Victorian lady has to maintain her composure because she cannot possibly tell the other people in the scene that a cat has gone spelunking under her dress, now you’ll know why.
So there’s this game called Crusader Kings II, which is a strategy game in which you play a medieval European dynasty — yes, you read that right, a dynasty. At any given time your “character” is the king of that dynasty, but when he kicks the bucket you switch over to playing his heir and so on. (Or her. But getting female inheritance going is near impossible if you aren’t Basque, and playing as Basque is near impossible all on its own. So.)
It’s quite well-designed; the people behind it seem to have a decent grasp of how medieval politics actually worked. You can’t go to war unless you have a casus belli, so no invading your neighbor without at least a fig leaf of justification. You spend half your time marrying off your unattached relatives, so that you’ll have allies when you do fight a war and three generations down the road your heir might inherit the crowns of four kingdoms. Etc. And after a while they started releasing expansions for non-Christian or non-kingdom options: The Old Gods for European paganism, Sword of Islam for the Middle East, The Republic so you can play as Venice or some place like that, Sons of Abraham for Judaism, Rajas of India for the subcontinent, etc. I haven’t played those personally, nor do I know all of the cultures in question well enough to judge quality, but I get the impression they continue to do a decent job of modeling historical dynamics in a realistic fashion — within, of course, the abstracted framework of a political/military strategy game.
. . . a mostly realistic fashion, that is. Because one of the DLCs is Sunset Invasion, in which the Aztecs invade Europe during the 13th century. Y’know. Like they did.
I thought, okay. The people making this game are obviously geeks, and geeks come up with these wild, over-the-top ideas. They’ve gotten it out of their system now.
Friends, I was wrong.
You guys. I wrote a CKII fic for Yuletide this past year. I made it as crazy as I could, based on my experiences with the game and some advice from my husband, but I’m well aware that it fell short of the full craziness CKII can produce. But even had I hit my mark . . . it would have been nothing compared to that tale above. All hail Sebdann, spawn of Satan and Queen of Milesia!
