Welcome to Welton

“So,” I said, “how different does it look?”

My mother surveyed the campus of Welton University and smiled. “This is my cue to say it seems smaller than I remember—but the truth is, it’s much bigger. It used to be all open field over there, behind Cavendish. We had epic snowball wars after second-quarter midterms.”

Her happy reminiscence made me shudder, thinking of the frozen doom that awaited me in a few months. My mother saw it and shook her head. “You’re the one who decided to go to college in Minnesota, Kimberly. It could have been Georgia Psi instead.”

Read the rest at Book View Cafe

* * * * *

There will be one of these coming each weekday for the next little while. (And, confidential to the handful of people for whom those names are familiar: yes. This is exactly what you think it is.)

Birthday Egotism, 2012 Edition

I have a tradition, dating back to 2003, of . . . well, rampant egotism on my birthday.

It’s an antidote to feelings of blah-ness (which were plaguing me on that day in 2003, and have been known to do so since). I make a post where I am only allowed to brag about the cool things I’ve done lately: no qualifications, no disclaimers, no undercutting myself. The last two years, for various reasons, I haven’t done the post in the usual manner (I’ve done other kinds of egotism-related things instead), so this time around, we’re gonna rack up three years’ worth of achievements.

I’m thirty-two today. What do I have to show for it?

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Guest Post: Morgan Keyes on herbal research (with bonus giveaway!)

Y’all may have noticed that I, er, do a lot of research. Like, a lot. So when Morgan Keyes (a friend and fellow writer) contacted me offering a guest post on the topic of how she researched herbal medicine for her upcoming middle grade book Darkbeast . . . I like to help friends, but the fact that I wanted to read her post may have also factored into me saying yes. 🙂

For those who want more than just the research guts, Morgan will also be giving away a copy of Darkbeast to one commenter, chosen at random. You have until 11:59 EDT tonight to leave a comment here and thus be eligible. No login required; just sign your comment with some kind of identifier, so we can tell the anonymouses apart!

***

In Darkbeast, twelve-year-old Keara runs away from home rather than sacrifice Caw, the raven darkbeast that she has been bound to magically all her life. Pursued by Inquisitors who would punish her for heresy, Keara joins a performing troupe of Travelers and tries to find a safe haven for herself and her companion.

In the novel, Keara’s mother is an accomplished herbalist who has vast stores of plant-based products that she uses to treat a wide variety of ailments. Keara has learned much at her mother’s knee, both about collecting various rare herbs and about selling the same. As with much of the knowledge we absorb from the world around us, Keara doesn’t realize how much she knows until she’s called upon to use her specialized information.

If only I had Keara’s information embedded in my own mind!

Instead, I needed to do a lot of research about herbs. I’m a trained researcher; I worked as a research librarian for nearly a dozen years before I started writing full time. For Darkbeast’s herblore, though, I used a different research foundation, one built in my very first professional job, as a lawyer.

Years ago, I was a lawyer representing many clients who manufactured food and nutritional items. My goal was often to convince the Federal Food and Drug Administration that my clients’ goods were “generally recognized as safe” (and therefore foods that could be marketed under a relatively relaxed food regimen, instead of the stricter controls for food additives, drugs, etc.) “Generally recognized as safe” could be proven in many ways, but one key option was showing that a plant had been consumed by humans for hundreds or thousands of years without any adverse effects.

As a result of the legal requirements, my office soon filled with a stunning array of cookbooks. I leveraged recipes, especially ones dating back a couple of centuries, to show that foods had been used for a long time, without anyone falling ill.

Of course, many of the foods I worked on had obscure ingredients – herbal non-nutritive sweeteners, for example. Those herbs weren’t likely to be listed in early cookbooks. Instead, I frequently researched medical treatments (even if an herb didn’t cure a disease, I could often cite it as a food reference.) I also read many anthropology studies that discussed ancient peoples’ use of ceremonial foods or early methods of food preservation.

Over the years, I’ve forgotten many of the specific titles that I relied on regularly in my law practice. And over the years, huge new libraries of information have become available over the Internet.

Imagine my pleasure, when I first started to build Keara’s stock of herbs, and a search of the phrase “medicinal herbs” yielded more than three million hits! I could readily limit the results by adding symptoms I wanted Keara and her mother to treat (“pleurisy”, for example, or “mental fog”). I could cut through the list by adding traits of the plant when that mattered (“yellow flower” or “triple leaf”). I could sift the results by restricting environmental information (“swamp” or “snow pack”).

And when the Internet didn’t give me the right information, or it gave me too much information, there was always the library’s grand collection of cookbooks (Dewey Decimal Number 641.5).

Of course, Darkbeast isn’t a treatise on the actual use of herbs. In fact, the vast majority of the herbs in the book are completely made up. But my background as a food lawyer leavened by my research skills as a librarian helped to make every herb ring true.

If you’re a writer, what’s the most challenging background research you’ve ever done? If you’re a reader, what fantasy novels have you read that were (or felt!) especially well-researched?

***

Morgan can be found online at her website or on Facebook.

Darkbeast is for sale in bricks-and-mortar and online bookstores, including: Amazon | B & N | Indiebound

Morgan Keyes grew up in California, Texas, Georgia, and Minnesota, accompanied by parents, a brother, a dog, and a cat. Also, there were books. Lots and lots of books. Morgan now lives near Washington, D.C. In between trips to the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery of Art, she reads, travels, reads, writes, reads, cooks, reads, wrestles with cats, and reads. Because there are still books. Lots and lots of books.

a couple of Kickstarters (or Indiegogo)

It’s going to be interesting to watch how well crowdfunding fares over the next few years. I’m getting more and more pleas to donate to or help promote various projects — enough that I’m very much having to pick and choose which ones I go with. You guys have been great about supporting the ones I’ve mentioned here before, but I don’t want to burn out your goodwill.

So, with that in mind, these three are all projects I actually have a personal desire to see succeed:

Pe’ Sla: Help Save Lakota Sioux Sacred Land — this one was launched when a sacred site in the Black Hills was put up on the auction block by the landowner. It’s since been taken down from auction, but according to the updates, the Great Sioux Nation is in private negotiation to buy as much of the land as they can. This is a Flexible Funding campaign, which means they get the donated funds even if they don’t reach their goal; it’s also worth noting that the crowdfunding is in addition to the money being put up by the tribes themselves. So the project helps take some of the burden off them/expand how much they can purchase and protect. Given the history in this country of fucking over indigenous groups by taking their land, this is a nice, direct way to help do the right thing.

The Gamers: Hands of Fate — on a less serious and political note . . . but only partly, I guess. I linked to this one before, but as part of a link dump, with very little explanation. To go into more detail: as described in this update, the filmmakers are actively concerned with and interested in doing something about the problems with gender in the gaming community. I quite enjoyed the first two movies in the series (the first on in particular is a hilarious tour through all kinds of good ol’ bad tropes in D&D), so I’m hoping this one gets the last bit of funding it needs to happen.

Electric Velocipede — finally, a small one for the magazine Electric Velocipede, which published my short story “Selection” some years back. They’re a quirky little market, and about halfway to their goal, which will fund them for the next four issues (i.e. a year).

fun with wuxia

I’m in the brainstorming stage of ideas for my L5R chapter, and so I put it to you, o internets:

What are your favorite wuxia plot tropes?

I’m thinking specifically of the more mystical end of things — more The Bride with White Hair than Hero, but really, anything in that general direction. I need to invent some history for this chapter, and I need some fuel to get my brain rolling in the right genre. (Feel free to recommend movies I might enjoy, while you’re at it.)

(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: On Prophecy

[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.]

Next month I’m going to dive into the final stretch of the Wheel of Time analysis. But before I do that, I’d like to talk about prophecy.

I thought about waiting a while longer. See, the major example I want to use for illustration is a plot that hasn’t actually paid off yet, as of the books I’ve read. This means that, while I can talk about where I think it’s going to go, I don’t actually know yet if I’m right. (Possibly some of you do, as I suspect the resolution is in The Towers of Midnight. But I dunno; maybe it’s in A Memory of Light. If it’s in ToM, though, don’t give any spoilers in the comments. I want to find out on my own how much of this is accurate.) In some ways, though, I think it’s more interesting to do it like this: to say what I think right now, without the hindsight warping it. So here we go.

The reason I wanted to discuss prophecy is that I think it’s one of the things Jordan does really, really well. In fact, if there’s one thing I would point at as the reason for my fannishness in high school — the thing that made me engage so enthusiastically with this series — prophecy would probably be it. On a metaphysical level, I’m not so fond of the trope: it puts the characters on a railroad track, taking away their agency and making their choices less meaningful. And that’s kind of true here, too, though Jordan sometimes goes the additional step required to make that interesting, which is to have the characters grapple with what it means to have their actions predestined. On the whole, though, it isn’t the existence of prophecy that I like.

It’s the way Jordan handles it. He strikes, I think, a very good (and delicate) balance of foreshadowing, giving enough information to be interesting, not so much as to spoil the entire plot. More to the point, he does this the right way: not through vagueness (which is what way too many fantasy authors try), but through breaking the information up and scattering it in a dozen different places.

It isn’t just the official Prophecies of the Dragon, with their pompous, pseudo-epic verse. It’s Egwene’s dreams, and those of the other Dreamers. It’s Elaida’s Foretellings, and Nicola’s, and Gitara Moroso’s. Min’s viewings. Aelfinn and Eelfinn tricks. Aiel prophecies and Sea Folk prophecies and things that aren’t even prophecy of any sort; they’re just little details of culture and history, stray lines characters speak here and there, tiny pieces you have to glue together to see that they have any significance at all.

Sure, some of it is vague. (Hi, Karaethon Cycle; how ya doin’?) But some of it is very specific, very clear . . . so long as you put it together right. And that’s why I think it works: if you’re the sort of reader who doesn’t want to know where the story is going, you don’t have to. Just read along, notice the obvious stuff, and let the rest surprise you when it comes. If, however, you’re the sort of person who likes to put together narrative jigsaw puzzles — which I am — then you can have a great deal of fun playing chase-the-clue through the books.

Having made the general statement, we’ll now go behind the spoiler cut for a specific example to show what I mean.

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Pieces for the Precious

As mentioned before, I intend to blog my progress (at least in the early days) of dusting off my long-neglected piano skills. I’ll have more detailed things to say in a while, but to start off with, I figured I’d give a run-down of what exactly I’m trying to play.

There are two basic categories. The first is “Operation Remember How It Goes.” Right now I’m working on pieces I used to have memorized, and can play in their entirety or very near to it . . . so long as I don’t think about what I’m doing. The instant I pay attention to my fingers, fffffffffft. Goodbye. My mother will be mailing a stack of old sheet music to me, so I’ll be able to refresh my memory, and eventually move on to the pieces I can’t play anymore, but used to know very well. For now, however, there are three major things in this category:

“No Holly for Miss Quinn” — this is an Enya piece off Shepherd Moons that I taught myself to play by ear. It’s very simple, and I really can still play all of it; I just have to not let my mind wander, or I end up stumbling onto the wrong arpeggio. I’ve been using it as a warmup, and the goal is to get back to the point where I can reliably play it in my sleep.

“Solfeggietto” — C.P.E. Bach. One of the last pieces I learned, back when I was still taking lessons. It’s a fun, impressive-sounding thing, but the basics of it aren’t that hard; it’s just hard to play well. Right now I forget bits and pieces and have to jump past them to continue on, so I’ll either need to cudgel my brain into coughing up the rest, or wait for the sheet music to arrive. Then it will be time to act like a grown-up and do the exercises my piano teacher set me back in the day, that I hated at the time. They’re boring as hell, but kind of necessary to make sure you play the piece evenly, without the sixteenth notes lurching around like drunkards.

“Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” — J.S. Bach. Learned this, or rather the first part of it, at the same time as “Solfeggietto.” I remember much less of it, and will definitely need the sheet music to get all of it back. But it’s also fun and cool-sounding (especially now that I can play it with an organ tone instead of a piano one). Barring a few bits, it isn’t very hard, either.

The second category of music are the project pieces, i.e. the new songs I’m trying to learn. Right now there are two of these, both chosen for their relatively low difficulty level.

“Roslin and Adama (Simplified Version)” — I reported on this before. I’m nearly at the point where I can play both hands together at tempo; it’s just a matter of getting myself reliably back to the point where my fingers (especially on my left hand) remember their way around a keyboard well enough that I don’t have to watch them all the time. I also tried the non-simplified version briefly last night, and nearly fell over with hysterical laughter — I don’t think I have EVER played a piece that actually used that much of the piano’s lowest register. The amount of time spent counting ledger lines before I could play the next chord . . . yeah. My brain needs more of a refresher course before I can do that one.

“O” — from the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name. Again, my left hand needs to remember more of its former competence before I’ll have this one down; there are too many stretched arpeggios that it has to be able perform without direct supervision. But we’ll get there.

I have a few other things I’m dinking at, but that’s most of it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go spend more time with the Precious . . . .

The Precious

When teleidoplex was living in Oakland, I drove over to the East Bay several times to play the piano in her co-op’s living room.

We’re talking a half-hour drive each way and a $5 bridge toll. To hang out with a friend too, sure — but if it weren’t for the piano, I would have been pressuring her to come to the Peninsula instead. 😉 And, as I said at the time, it made me really want to buy a keyboard for myself.

A year later — well after she’d moved out of the co-op — I was still thinking about it.

No, thinking is too mild a term. I was longing for a piano.

There’s a store not far away that sells keyboards. I went and tried some out. Found one I liked. Went back today to play it more extensively, see if it was really the one I wanted. Was allllllllmost happy with it . . . then tried a keyboard one tier up in price.

Yeah. It’s worth it.

The difference between this one (inadvertently dubbed “The Precious,” due to a brief Gollum-like incident in the store) and the stuff one tier down is that in this one, each key samples not only the individual note, but also the resonance of the other 87 — the strings that would be vibrating, if this thing had strings. The difference is very, very audible, if you play piano. And the touch is better, and, and . . . yeah. The Precious.

The touch is right, the pedal is right — hell, even the texture of the keys is less plastic-feeling. It has more bells and whistles than the picture would lead you to believe; they’re catering to a consumer like me, who doesn’t want lots of buttons and LCD displays de-piano-ifying the look of the thing, but if you read the owner’s manual, there’s an impressively non-intuitive system for using those eight buttons to achieve some interesting effects. You can adjust the touch of the keys, and also the brightness of the sound, in addition to the usual ability to change basic sounds — more than I really want, but I will admit the ability to play “Toccata and Fugue in D Minor” with the sound of an actual organ is gratifying. ^_^ And I appreciate both the built-in metronome and the headphone jack, especially since the latter lets me play while kniedzw is watching TV without bothering him (or inflicting all my wrong notes on his ears).

And? It will never need tuning. <g>

So, yeah. I am now the proud owner of the most piano-like thing I could buy short of buying an actual piano. It makes me exceedingly happy. Look for more posts in upcoming days, as I begin my journey through remembering how to hell to play this thing . . . .

tales of good customer service

Scandinavian Designs wins a cookie. I couldn’t find the receipt from the bed we purchased more than two years ago, but I called them up and, after providing my phone number, was told that the item is still under warranty, and they will have a replacement piece (the wood of one of the side boards has split) sent to us within 7-10 business days. The entire conversation took about a minute flat.

Edited to add: and then one minute later, an e-mail asking if I could send a photo, just to speed things up.

Now let’s see if Sprint can do equally well with my malfunctioning phone. Somehow I suspect not . . . .

I mentioned a little while ago that I’ve joined the Book View Cafe. So far I’m an invisible part of the group — though that will be changing quite soon! — but if you want any easy way to keep up with what’s going on over there, there’s now a place in the sidebar to sign up for the newsletter. I think it’s only going to be once a month, letting you know what’s new, what’s on sale, all that good stuff.

Not Being a Creeper: Two Examples

John Scalzi has posted An Incomplete Guide to Not Creeping, i.e. how not to be that guy women avoid at cons. He’s got a number of good points — but I wanted to follow up by giving two examples, of situations I’ve been in where it could have been creepy and wasn’t.

See, sometimes you get guys responding to this kind of thing by wailing that they’ll never be able to compliment a woman again, or whatever. And that just isn’t the case. You can say nice things to a woman, or even touch her — or even try to hit on her! — without weirding her out. Here’s how.

Example 1: the sweet fellow at the concert

my first gaming credit

It’s no secret that I’m a gamer. RPGS, both tabletop and LARP, are one of my main hobbies; they’re also what I studied in graduate school. I’ve written academic papers on the subject, and grew a novel series out of one of the games I’ve run. From time to time I come up with system hacks for running games in particular settings; when I was playing Changeling, I wrote an entire splatbook’s worth of material for Mesoamerican fae.

Some of you may recall that a while ago, I started messing around with an alternate history for the game Legend of the Five Rings. I stopped posting about that because shortly after I began, the guys at AEG announced that they would be taking submissions for Imperial Histories 2 — that is, proposals for chapters on various eras of Rokugan’s past.

Including alternate histories.

Last night, I got an e-mail telling me that my proposal for “The Togashi Dynasty” has been accepted, and will be included in the volume.

This pleases me greatly not only because, hey, sale, but because I love the chance to broaden my horizons and publish something in a new field. And L5R is a great game, with a rich setting and a devoted player base — as evidenced by the dozens of submissions they got for IH2. I think writing this chapter is going to be a lot of fun, and I look forward to seeing what’s in the rest of the book.

last call for Clockwork Phoenix 4; also, a short story

There’s just under a day left on the Clockwork Phoenix 4 Kickstarter. If you wanted to pre-order a copy, this is a way to do it. 🙂

Also, the latest issue of Apex Magazine is live, containing my (very) short story “Waiting for Beauty.” (This is one of my darker fairy tale retellings, though less Lovecraftian than most in that set.) I haven’t yet had a chance to read the rest of the issue, but it looks absolutely smashing, with stories from Genevieve Valentine, Kat Howard, and Nir Yaniv, as well as nonfiction from Lynne M. Thomas and jimhines, and an interview with Genevieve.

Books read, July 2012

The shortness of this list makes it look like I didn’t read much last month. It’s true that I didn’t read a lot, but what the list doesn’t show are all the books I started and didn’t finish. Some of them were novels I put down because I wasn’t enjoying them enough, some were research books of which I only needed to read part, and some I will finish — just haven’t done it yet.

But as for the stuff I did get all the way through:

Mastiff, Tamora Pierce. Discussed in more detail elsewhere, but that was as part of a conversation on writing theory. General summation is that I found this one disappointing. The individual bits were well enough, but as a follow-up to Bloodhound and a conclusion to the series, it just didn’t pack enough of a punch. I had been hoping for better.

Glamour in Glass, Mary Robinette Kowal. This, on the other hand, I enjoyed more than its predecessor, Shades of Milk and Honey. I wanted more oomph in that book, and the sequel delivered. But that inspires thinky thoughts in me, since I was on a panel with Kowal at Fourth Street in which we talked about “domestic” fantasy and novels that don’t resort to violent confrontation as a source of conflict, and well, this book is a lot less domestic than the previous one. Indeed, that’s why I enjoyed it more. Espionage! Napoleon on the march! Military applications of glamour! Fun stuff, but now I have to go chew on the issues we were discussing, and think about the changes Kowal made.

The Phantom Tollbooth, Normal Juster. Would you believe I’d never read this? I thought I had — assumed it, really, since it’s one of those childhood classics everybody seems to have read — but my brother (who hadn’t read it) had the book lying around, and when I picked it up I discovered that, nope, had never touched the thing in my life. Anyway, it was enjoyable, though (as when I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland, which is very much in the same genre) I had to read it in short bursts. I just can’t do large doses of whimsy at a time, you know? But Juster does the good thing, which is to have interesting points squirreled away inside the whimsy, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading this one.

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:

Imgur set

National Geographic set

Music humour:

“Early one day, a C, an E-flat, and a G go into a bar . . .”

The truth about oboes

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?