since I linked to the bad part
An update on the Readercon debacle. It is pretty much everything I was hoping for.
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
The Best of BCS, Year Three
Scott Andrews at Beneath Ceaseless Skies is running a poll to choose the final story for the third-year “Best of” anthology. I’m in the running, with “Two Pretenders” (which is peripherally an Onyx Court story); I am, however, up against some stiff competition. BCS publishes good stuff!
You can vote in the poll until midnight Friday, Pacific time — I’m not sure if that means eleven and a half hours from now, or thirty-five and a half. Vote now, vote often! Wait, no. Vote once. In this round, anyway. Then vote again in the run-off. (I’ll post a heads-up when that happens.)
In other short-story related news, Clockwork Phoenix 4 will be paying pro rates! Many thanks to everyone who contributed. There’s still time to get in on the game, too, and one more stretch goal to aim for.
Spoiler Alert! (Watch this make people not read the post.)
The Boston Globe has an interesting piece from January about spoilers and how we respond to them. Short form: for many people, spoilers actually enhance, rather than detract from, their enjoyment of the full story. And this is true even for people who are convinced that they prefer not to have any spoilers at all.
I would put myself in the camp of not wanting spoilers, but when I read through the reasoning presented in the article, it was exactly what I would have predicted. By knowing where the story is going, we allay our subconscious anxiety. Knowing that Character A lives means we don’t have to be as afraid for her; knowing that Character B dies means we’re prepared for it when it comes. As brilliantly cathartic as it can be to go through those experiences without the psychological safety net, that works best when we really, really trust the storyteller not to disappoint or betray us. And how often is that true?
A story can work even when we know the ending — even when we can quote the entire thing line for line. Usually people say this is because you can still appreciate the craft, the process by which that ending comes about, and there’s a lot of truth to that. But it isn’t the whole story (no pun intended). A good enough narrative can still pack its emotional punch as well as an intellectual one, even on a revisit. My favorite example of this is Apollo 13, a movie I adore and have watched quite a few times. Not only is it familiar to me, it’s based on freaking history. You would think that by now, there would be zero suspense for me in the question of whether they’ll get home safely or not.
And yet, every time I watch that movie, I’m on the edge of my seat during those minutes of radio silence.
There’s a secret ingredient that makes it work: empathy. Sure, I know that the astronauts will be safe. I knew that even before I sat down to watch the movie. But the characters don’t know. And because my heart is with them, because I am imagining myself in their shoes rather than sitting comfortably in my own, I am petrified and tearful, just like they are. And when it all turns out okay, I get the same cathartic release.
I find myself thinking that when people say spoilers ruin the story for them, I am the most inclined to believe the ones who also never re-read books, never re-watch movies. But I have plenty of books and movies I revisit, and enjoy just as much (or more) the second time around. So it makes me think that, for me at least, what spoilers ruin are bad stories. Weak ones, that don’t do the work of making me empathize with the characters, and don’t provide the intellectual pleasure of examining how the dominoes got lined up. They have to rely on the element of surprise to engage me, and once that’s gone, they’ve blown their wad. Good stories survive the spoiler process just fine, and maybe even turn out better for it. I can relax into the experience, knowing I’m in skilled hands.
Possibly this explains why I love movie trailers as much as I do. I still get annoyed when I think the trailer gave the whole story away (and feel pleasant surprise when it turns out I’m wrong — that’s happened in the oddest places, sometimes), but I like the preview of what I’ll be getting. I read the cover copy of books, I read friends’ reviews (though I sometimes — not always — avoid the ones that say they contain major spoilers) . . . but I don’t go as far as some do and read the last five pages. I’m sort of tempted to try that now, and see how it goes. After all, the good books should, in theory, be unharmed.
But I’ll still put spoiler alerts on things I write. It’s expected courtesy these days, and I might get lynched if I didn’t. So I’ll just say: it’s okay. You’re allowed to highlight the hidden text, to click through and see what’s behind the cut. I won’t judge you for it if you do.
link dump
Two more on gun control:
American gun owners are under siege
The Second Amendment and the fantasy of revolution
Several on gender:
Kickstarter project for another Gamers movie (which is going into this category because of this update)
Rundown on the Readercon debacle
Finding That a “Dynamic” Pose is Defined by Gender (comic books, and not surprising, but the redraws really help hammer the point home)
Victoria’s Secret vs. Dove (a very striking contrast)
Just Another Princess Movie (an interesting analysis of Brave, that says it is not just another princess movie)
Awesome photos:
Music humour:
“Early one day, a C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar . . .”
And now my browser can stop weeping for mercy.
we can’t all be the goddamned Batman
There’s a moment in The Dark Knight Rises — don’t worry; no spoilers — where Bruce Wayne gets from one part of the world to the other, in a very short span of time, without access to his usual resources.
How does he manage that? As kniedzw said when I brought this up to him, “He’s the goddamned Batman, that’s how.”
And you know, I’m fine with that as an answer. It fits the genre, and the place that scene occupies in the story; nobody wants to pause there for an extended dissertation on the logistics of international travel. Or even a short one, really. If it isn’t an interesting and relevant part of the story, we should skip over it and get to the parts that are.
. . . I talk a good talk there, but the truth is that I have a damn hard time doing this in my own work. Skipping over routine things, sure. I don’t do a blow-by-blow of every last action my characters take. But when something less than 100% routine happens, I have a hard time saying “my character is the goddamned Batman” and moving on. If I’d been writing The Dark Knight Rises, I would have had to figure out — for my own edification, if nobody else’s — just how Bruce Wayne got from A to B under those circumstances. And, if it were a novel, probably looked for a place to toss in a line of narration or dialogue nodding in the direction of whatever explanation I worked out. Because however willing I am to grant other people’s stories the benefit of the doubt in these cases, I have a hard time believing anybody else will do the same for me.
Obviously there are places where the benefit of the doubt falls down. If the thing being glossed over is too outrageous, I can’t bridge that gap, and the stumble distracts me from the story. Or if you make too frequent a habit of doing it, I begin to feel like you’re lazy, dodging all the hard stuff because you only want to have fun (and your fun gets flimsier as a result). Or if you’re trying to be all realistic and crunchy about how things get done, and then you handwave past something major, I suspect you did that because you couldn’t find a way to get it done, and your only answer was to cheat. I also think it’s easier for movies to get away with this trick than novels. They move at their own pace, rather than the reader’s, leaving less time for spotting holes; they also aren’t expected to go into as much detail, lest their run time be nine hours. And some genres accommodate this trick better than others.
But we do it in novels, too, whether the extent is lesser or greater. Dorothy Dunnett spends all of a couple of sentences on telling us how half a dozen guys made their way across sixteenth-century Europe to Russia. Those sentences nod to them having a lot of trouble doing it, but it’s only a nod, with no explanation; we are invited to understand that they are each the goddamned Batman, and that’s how they managed it.
Sometimes it’s a benefit for me to work through those things, to answer all the logistical questions for myself, if not for the reader. Sometimes, though . . . it’s easy to get hung up on this, to stall forward progress because I have to nail down every last detail in my head. And sometimes I catch myself subsequently putting those details into the story, because if I don’t show my math I don’t trust that the reader will trust me.
It isn’t just a plot issue; sometimes it’s a worldbuilding one, too. For Isabella’s memoirs, I’m working through a myriad of details on climate, geology, and other such details of the natural world, because my hindbrain is convinced that I can’t be allowed to gloss over a single thing there. We aren’t talking Tolkien’s suspiciously rectangular mountain ranges here, either: I mean that if I don’t set up the elevation and surrounding topography of the swamps of Mouleen precisely right for the amount of rainfall they receive, everybody will notice.
And the truth is, only some readers will. The climatologists among you. If they’re paying close attention. And maybe not even then, since it isn’t like I’m providing information on the exact latitude of Mouleen, or the direction of ocean currents along its shore. (Though believe you me, my brain would try to work the ocean currents out, if I didn’t keep it on a leash.)
I have to do some of this for the series because it’s about a scientist, and that means I need to be able to talk about the science without the whole thing falling down. But it is also supposed to be an adventure. The adventure tone is not served by me anxiously showing my math on every last detail of plot and setting. And yet I still struggle to believe that I can get away with anything, even as I let other people do it all the time.
I’d be interested in examples of authors you think have done this badly or well. What factors determine how willing you are to leap over those gaps?
another Clockwork Phoenix update
The Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter project has hit the first of its stretch goals. It’s less than $1400 away from the second stretch goal, with nine days to reach that target.
I can’t say anything in encouragement without it being kind of self-serving. The purpose of the stretch goals is to let Mike Allen (time_shark) pay the authors more money for their stories; if the project brings in $8000, he can pay five cents a word, which is the baseline professional rate. Since I intend to send him a story, I have a vested interest in seeing the project hit that target. But it’s broader than that, I promise you: the CP anthologies have been really good, and are the sort of thing for which authors in general deserve to be paid professional rates.
Mike has added a variety of new reward packages, so even if you’ve already pledged, you might want to check it out and see if there’s anything else you want. And if you haven’t, now is a dandy time to start.
Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Afternoon
I really wanted to like your book, because it’s so very much up my alley in terms of subject matter. But the writing just didn’t work for me, on a fundamental level: too much dialogue that didn’t sound like things people would say, too many places where one paragraph didn’t lead into the next, too many one-line paragraphs chopping the whole thing up into kindling.
Man, my batting average is not very good right now.
Gun control
Sure, let’s go ahead and play with fire. I trust my readers to be civil to one another in the comments.
***
I simply cannot. understand. the state of gun laws in this country, and the direction they’re headed in. That people think private gun ownership should be legal, yes; that people think civilians ought to be able to walk around with a semi-automatic rifle, no. That you should be able to go hunting, yes; that you should be able to carry a concealed handgun anywhere you like, no.
And yet our current progress is toward less regulation of guns, not more.
I’ve seen the usual pro-gun arguments, and very few of them make sense to me. Hunting! Do you need an AR-15 to kill a deer? Defending my home! How many lives have been saved by shooting the intruder, and how many have been lost due to those guns being put to another purpose? If only somebody in that theater had been armed, they could have stopped Holmes! It’s a nice fantasy, but do you really think one or more civilians shooting in a darkened, panic- and smoke-filled, chaotic room — against a guy in body armor — would have resulted in fewer deaths, rather than more?
I could go on. Even if we ban guns, criminals will still find ways to get them. So this means we shouldn’t try to regulate them, to keep an eye on who’s buying what, and to keep the really dangerous things out of the hands of people without black market connections? People will still kill each other, just with different weapons. Weapons that can’t easily take out their victims in mass quantities; I’d call that an improvement. You’re far more likely to die in a car accident than from a gunshot! True, and I’m also in favor of improving automobile safety, as well as regulating guns.
But treating those two as equivalent is nonsense. Cars serve an absolutely vital purpose in our society that has nothing to do with inflicting violence on others. If we banned motor vehicles, this entire house of cards we call a country would fall down. Furthermore, there’s a balance point between minimizing risk and the costs thereof, and it’s hard to decide where that should fall. Most people agree that making cars incapable of going over twenty miles an hour would be an unacceptable cost, no matter how many lives it would save. We make calculations like this all the time, even if we don’t like to admit it.
But right now, we’re saying — as a society — that this is an acceptable cost for gun rights. So are this, and this, and this. And a bunch of this, though I can’t find a list that just covers the United States. And we’re saying that minimizing that risk would cost more than we’re willing to pay. That waiting periods, background checks, mandatory training, prohibitions against carrying a concealed handgun in particular places, bans on weapons that serve no purpose but to slaughter large numbers of people at high speed — those would take away something so precious that it’s worth the lives of all those people.
We’ll ban costumes at movie theaters instead. Because we all know that guns don’t kill people; people wearing costumes do. (With guns.)
And yeah, yeah, Second Amendment! This post is a very rational assessment of that, and I agree with a lot of what it says (including the follow-up). Our private gun ownership laws, in their current condition, are not providing us with “a well regulated militia,” nor are they contributing to “the security of a free state.” Quite the opposite, I’d say.
Mind you, I do agree with the guns versus cars post that we’re doing a terrible job of promoting solutions. Those of us who favor gun control need to find new tactics, a way to change the conversation to one the NRA hasn’t already won. I don’t know how to do that — but I do know we need to actually talk about it, and not just mouth platitudes about tragedy and then go our way as if Aurora was no more preventable than an earthquake.
I do take comfort from the statistics that say gun violence has actually declined in recent decades, and so has gun ownership. That’s good to hear. But when smallpox deaths declined, we didn’t celebrate that and stop there; we went ahead and eradicated the disease completely. Do I think we can eradicate gun violence? Of course not. But we can do better, and should.
Monday assortment
Belatedly, I am over at SF Novelists again this month, posting about why failure is good for you.
Also belatedly, I am in another Mind Meld at SF Signal, this one on the topic of monarchies in fantasy.
Clockwork Phoenix 4 is a go! Now it’s a matter of hitting the stretch goals. $6500 will allow Mike Allen to pay contributors four cents a word (instead of three); $8000 will allow him to pay five cents a word, which is the baseline for professional rates in science fiction and fantasy. There are still sixteen days in which to make those happen . . . .
Gorgeous sculptural book art by Guy Laramee. I think the first is my favorite — that hidden canyon.
Really clever designs for Avengers-inspired evening gowns. Not just the major heroes, either: it hits Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Captain America, Coulson, Nick Fury, Maria Hill, Black Widow, and Hawkeye, though I had to go hunting to find Loki separately. (Full group shot here.)
Reasons I Have Quit Reading Your Book This Evening
Look, I sympathize. It is genuinely difficult to have your POV character be Totally Wrong about something in a way the audience can detect but he is completely unaware of, and have that work. But one of its failure modes is “your POV character is a blithering idiot,” and I’m afraid that’s how I felt in this instance.
It probably didn’t help that everybody else in the novel was coming across as abrasive and unhelpful, too.
Sorry. I really wanted to like your book, but it just didn’t work out.
Geekomancy
Huge, huge congratulations to my friend Michael R. Underwood, whose first novel, Geekomancy, is out this week from Pocket Star.
It’s e-book only, which means I cannot do the traditional friend service of running to the bookstore and surreptitiously turning all the copies to face out, while having a loud conversation about how this book changed my life and even made my bed for me when I got up this morning. But I can link you to it, which is . . . okay, not as entertaining. But it’s something!
Conga-rats, Mike. A very long and energetic line of them. 🙂
Information Density Pt. 2, or, let’s try an example
I said before that it’s hard to talk about certain issues in writing without specific examples. Since I just finished reading a book that I think illustrates the challenge of information density and scale very well, I’m back for a follow-up round.
Before I get into the example, though, an anecdote. One of the archaeological sites I worked on has reconstructions of period houses as part of a public display. Several are very well-constructed, and one is a mess. But I’ll never forget what one of the archaeologists said about that one: “We’ve learned more from our mistakes here than we have from the ones we did right.”
The book I want to discuss is one I think failed to manage the kinds of issues that don’t fit easily into fiction. It tried, but it didn’t succeed. I think well of the author for trying, and am not here to mock or belittle her effort; in fact, as the author in question is Tamora Pierce, she’s someone I think fairly well of overall. But I think you can often learn more from an ambitious failure than a success.
Oh, and just in case anybody didn’t see this coming: there will be MASSIVE SPOILERS. If you haven’t yet read Mastiff, the third and last of the Beka Cooper books, I will be discussing the main conflict (though I will try to stay away from spoiling some of the other important things that happen along the way).
For those who haven’t read any of the series . . . it’s about the Provost’s Guard, aka the Provost’s Dogs, who are the police force for the medievalish kingdom of Tortall. (Aside: yes, it’s odd for a setting like that to have an organized police force. But whatever; it’s the buy-in for the story.) The protagonist, Beka Cooper, starts off as a “Puppy” or new Guardswoman, and becomes more experienced as the series goes on. Each book deals with a different type of crime: in the first one, it’s smuggling; in the second, it’s counterfeiting; in the third, it’s slavery.
. . . sort of. Slavery is actually legal in Tortall; the actual crime in this book is treason. But slavery is more central to the plot in many ways, and if you follow me behind the cut to spoiler territory, I’ll start to unpack that.
Clockwork Phoenix 4 . . . ?
I’d like to take a break from fielding comments on my last post to announce something very exciting:
Or rather, a Kickstarter campaign for it. You may recall the first three Clockwork Phoenix anthologies, all three of which I was very pleased to have a story in. The anthologies did quite well, in terms of both recognition and sales . . . but Norilana Books, the publisher, has fallen on hard times due to non-business-related issues, and can’t do a fourth. Since the small press is a very precarious world — and anthologies are even more precarious — Kickstarter is the best way to go about continuing the series.
As you can tell by the fact that I’ve been in all three books so far, I really like the CP anthologies, and would love to see them continue. (Full disclosure: yes, of course I intend to submit something. And given my track record so far, I have high hopes of success.) So take a look at the project page, and if you see anything you like in the rewards, pledge a few bucks. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that we can make this happen.
Information Density, or, cramming a fifty-pound sausage into a five-pound sack
alecaustin recently had a thought-provoking post on his LJ, riffing off some recent discussions about the people and issues that are “invisible” in fiction to talk about information density and how you can’t fit everything into a story. In particular, there are certain kinds of topics that fit very badly indeed. He has a few examples of his own, but since I want to dig into this issue more deeply, I’m going to use one I know fairly well, which is the English Civil War.
One of the books I read when doing research for In Ashes Lie was called Causes of the English Revolution 1529-1642. As the title suggests, its argument is that the wars of the mid-seventeenth century had their roots in the sixteenth — which is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to convey in fiction, when the cause in question isn’t a simple case of “this person was assassinated five generations ago, and we still bear a grudge for that.” In particular, I’m going to tease out one economic strand for the purposes of our discussion here. If you’re not interested in reading about that sort of thing (if you aren’t, I can’t blame you), then scroll on down; I’ll get back to my point in a moment.
(Fair Warning: my point is long. And digresses along the way.)
***
while the cat’s away . . . .
A while back, I guest-blogged for jimhines, posting about the irrationality of fairy tales. Now I’m back for a second round: this time I look at legends, which not only make more sense, but are more closely related to fantasy.
Comment over there, either on the LJ post or its WordPress mirror.
Purty pictures!
Now that everybody’s had time to send me icons . . . alessandriana, you’re the winner! Many, many thanks, and as you can see, I’m already using it. If you send your mailing address to me (marie {dot} brennan [at] gmail {dot} com), I’ll get the ARC on its way to you.
Of course, those of you who have gotten ARCs have only gotten the story. (And a not-fully-revised version of the story, at that — though at this point I’ve totally lost track of what I changed after they got printed.) You don’t have the lovely, lovely cover, and you don’t have what showed up in my inbox today:
The interior art.
See, back when I was developing this pitch, my agent suggested that I make Isabella an artist. Life drawing was — and still is — an important skill for natural historians. The idea clicked, and then I had a pie-in-the-sky hope: could I convince my publisher to include sketches in the book? Sketches of Isabella’s own work?
Tor agreed, and so not only is Todd Lockwood doing the cover, he’s producing ten rougher, black-and-white drawings that will be scattered throughout the novel. It is perfect. They aren’t all done yet — a few are still in the “preliminary sketch” stage — but the ones I’ve seen are utterly fabulous. And it will add so much to the book, being able to have the artwork in there, supporting the idea that Isabella is drawing everything she sees in Vystrana.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to sneak any previews of that to you guys before the book comes out. But I wanted to let you know that my beautiful, beautiful cover is not the only Lockwood art this book will have; the purtiness continues inside. I can’t wait to see the finished product.
Books read, June 2012
A timely post for once! And also a better list than I had last month, by far.
what I’ve been sitting on for months now
It got an official, shiny reveal on Tor.com today. Several people there have already mentioned the D&D Draconomicon, and that’s no accident: Todd Lockwood’s line drawings in that book were one of the elements that inspired this series in the first place. So when I found out he was going to be doing the art for MY book . . . .
You can imagine my reaction. ^_^
And, the usual drill: I need an icon! And I have no Photoshop skills! If you make me an LJ icon out of that cover, and post it in the comments, I will pick one and send the winner my final ARC of A Natural History of Dragons. (Final for now; I’m sure I’ll have more later.) The book itself won’t be out until February of next year, so you’d be getting quite a jump on everybody else.
Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go off and make little eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee noises to myself for a while longer.
Forgot to mention
This month’s SF Novelists post went up on a weekend, and then I forgot to mention it in the rush to get ready for Fourth Street. But the wonderful thing about the Internet is, the post is still there, just waiting for you to read it! Exceptions are the rule.
Comment over there; no login required; first-time commenters will be slightly delayed while I fish them out of the moderation queue.
Fourth Street Fantasy
Last weekend I went for the first time to Fourth Street Fantasy, a Minneapolis con that apparently ran for many years, died out, and was resurrected five or so years back by a local fan, rising from the dead to be more awesome than ever*.
(*I never went to the old version, so this description is based entirely on how awesome I found the con as it is now.)
If you are anything resembling local — or even if you’re not — you should think about checking this one out. It’s small (in the 100-200 attendee range), but the sort of smallness that allows for good, intensive conversation with cool people. And with alecaustin putting together the programming, there is no shortage of fodder for such conversations. He has said before that he’s tired of the introductory, freshman-level nature of panel topics at many conventions, and wants more upper-level or graduate kinds of subjects. Thus it was that my three panel topics this weekend were: politics and complexity of same in fantasy (which delved into some of the nitty-gritty of what is necessary to do good, believable political complexity in fiction, and what historical examples one might look to for inspiration and instruction), “blood, love, and rhetoric” (using the Player King’s speech from Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead as a jumping-off point for talking about violence and “domestic narratives” in fantasy), and . . .
Okay, so they have this tradition. You know how sometimes when you’re at a con, the panelists will either digress wildly onto some unrelated topic, or teeter at the edge of such a digression before regretfully declaring “but that’s another panel”? Well, Fourth Street keeps a list of those “other panels,” and for the last programming slot of the con, picks one of them to be the special last-minute topic. I ended up getting tapped to talk about “why we want stories about divine-right kings” on Sunday afternoon, and had to cudgel my brain into talking about the origins of state formation in early agricultural societies (and what this means for the stories we tell). Despite the fact that I was nearing unto mental exhaustion by then, and had to throw every ounce of remaining energy into holding my own against Steven Brust and Beth Meacham (executive editor at Tor), along with Caroline Stevermer and Mary Robinette Kowal, I think it went fairly well.
If you weren’t at Fourth Street, you can still get in on a piece of the fun: they made the very sensible decision to keep track of all the books mentioned on each panel, and have posted the list for everyone’s delectation. (It also includes some quotes from the panels.)
Anyway, excellent con with excellent people. I’ll be a few days yet regenerating the dead brain cells, but on the way home I had several pieces of the next novel shuffle themselves into something like a line, so clearly something is still working inside my skull. Now I just need to spend some quality time working up a map, since I can’t figure out the politics of Nsebu and Mouleen and the Labane and the places that don’t have names yet if I don’t know where they are in relation to one another.
