Re(Visiting) the Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (analysis)

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

And now we talk about structure.

I don’t envy Sanderson the challenge he faced, picking up the end of this series and trying to wrangle it into something like order. Jordan may have insisted that by god it was going to be ONE MORE BOOK, but I don’t see any way in hell that could have ever worked — and I say that without even having read Towers of Midnight yet, let alone A Memory of Light. There’s enough here in this book that unless both of those are Crossroads of Twilight-level bogs of plotlessness (which I very much doubt), a single volume would have read like the Cliff Notes version of the finale.

But Sanderson didn’t have a terribly good foundation to build on, structurally speaking, as he went into the final stretch. Card-weaving would make an ideal metaphor to describe the situation here, but since very few of you know how that works, we’ll go with architecture instead: he, as the construction manager, inherited a building with four good, solid stories at the bottom, three or so dodgy levels above that, three ramshackle levels held together with increasing quantities of baling wire and duct tape, and then one that makes a valiant attempt at being structurally sound. Atop this mess, he had to build one (eventually three) final levels, and make them as habitable and pleasant as possible.

Spoiler-cut time, as I start dissecting this book to see what makes it tick.

Icon winner and new buy links

alessandriana, you managed what I couldn’t; you got the Tower card to be big enough to make out, while still getting the title in the image. Thank you! Just let me know whether you want an eventual print copy of the novel, or tuckerization in the sequel I hope to write. And my thanks to everyone who submitted an icon: you’re all far better at this than I am.

Apropos of Lies and Prophecy making money, you can now buy it at Barnes and Noble, and Kobo, and Apple, along with Amazon and the actual publisher, Book View Cafe. If you have a preferred e-book vendor that isn’t selling it directly, please do let me know; I can’t promise I’ll be able to get it there, but I can look into it. (BVC sells both epub and mobi formats, though, which should work on pretty much any device.)

I will have an open book thread for Lies and Prophecy soon, but I’m waiting for a specific date. (You’ll understand why when we get there.) In the meantime, enjoy!

Comets, now conveniently sized for your pocket!

A Star Shall Fall is out today in mass-market paperback. Apart from being, y’know, smaller, with a slightly different cover, it should also have various errata corrected (like the bad arithmetic when Irrith goes to get bread). I say “should” because I don’t yet have my hands on a copy to check, but I did have the opportunity to send in corrections, and I think I caught all the places where they were needed. Famous last words . . . .

BTW, since the past couple of days have been crazy, I haven’t yet chosen an icon. I’m extending the deadline until tonight, just in case somebody else wants to hop in.

(Re)Visiting the Wheel of Time: The Gathering Storm (reactions)

[This is part of a series analyzing Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time novels. Previous installments can be found under the tag. Comments on old posts are welcome, but please, no spoilers for books after this one.]

I’ll be doing two posts apiece for the final three books, the ones written by Sanderson — not because Sanderson wrote them, but because the story in them is actually new to me. (I should have also done this for Knife of Dreams, on the same grounds, but I’m not going to backtrack that far now.)

In order to keep my remarks something like organized, I’m splitting them into my reactions as a reader, and my analysis as a writer. Of course, it won’t really be possible to keep those two things entirely separate: my reader-reactions will inevitably include some analytical comments, and my structural analysis will perforce be colored by my feelings as a reader. But this will at least allow me to have two lengthy posts, rather than one unreadably long monstrosity.

Reactions first. And these are as spoilery as spoilers get, so let’s go behind the cut.

(more…)

Yuletide nominations are open

For those who are interested, Yuletide nominations have begun.

Note that this is an optional part of the process, even if you want to do Yuletide; it’s only necessary if there’s something specific you know you want to request. (Or offer, since some people nominate based on what they’d be interested in writing.) If you do have something in that vein, though, nomination is the only way to be sure it will be available this year.

(If you’re not sure what Yuletide is in the first place, or want more info, there’s finally an up-to-date FAQ you can consult.)

you knew this was coming

My general incompetence with image manipulation continues. So: who wants to make me an icon for Lies and Prophecy? (You can find a large version of the cover here.) It can be animated or static, it can show the hand or just a card or whatever looks good at 100×100 pixels.

I’ll pick one on Monday, to give people a little time to work. And the winning artist can have their choice between a print copy of Lies and Prophecy once I have ’em, or tuckerization (that is, the use of their name) for a minor character in the sequel — presuming, of course, that L&P sells well enough for me to write the sequel, which I hope it will. I promise to make it a cool character, though.

more Driftwood!

My short story output has been dismal lately, but I did manage to complete and sell another Driftwood story: “The Ascent of Unreason,” now live at BCS (not to be confused with BVC, which is what I originally typed), both as text and as a podcast. (And if you check that last link, you’ll see that there are also e-reader versions available — pdf, mobi, epub, etc.)

I have work I really ought to be doing today, work with deadlines attached . . . but I sort of feel like writing a short story. I may poke at my various seedlings and see if any of them are ready to sprout.

Mitt Romney, Bubble Boy

In light of Romney’s self-inflicted gut wound this week, I find myself dwelling on this piece by Jeremiah Goulka, about how and why he ceased to be a Republican.

The enormity of the advantages I had always enjoyed started to truly sink in. Everyone begins life thinking that his or her normal is the normal. For the first time, I found myself paying attention to broken eggs rather than making omelets. Up until then, I hadn’t really seen most Americans as living, breathing, thinking, feeling, hoping, loving, dreaming, hurting people. My values shifted — from an individualistic celebration of success (that involved dividing the world into the morally deserving and the undeserving) to an interest in people as people.
[…]
My old Republican worldview was flawed because it was based upon a small and particularly rosy sliver of reality. To preserve that worldview, I had to believe that people had morally earned their “just” desserts, and I had to ignore those whining liberals who tried to point out that the world didn’t actually work that way.

Goulka says a lot more, going into detail about how Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq War pried the scales from his eyes, but that’s the part that I keep thinking about — because it’s the only way I can make sense of Mitt Romney.

I think the man has spent his entire life in a socio-economic bubble so hermetically sealed that he doesn’t even realize the world outside it exists. That’s how he can see forty-seven percent of this country as moochers selfishly glued to the governmental teat, shirking personal responsibility while the virtuous men of his class keep the country going. That’s why he thinks people making two hundred thousand dollars a year are middle class; that’s why he can say, with a straight face, that he “inherited nothing.” By his standards, those statements are true. But his standards are so skewed, the skew has completely vanished from his field of vision. He’s a poster boy for privilege: carrying so much of it, and so utterly blind to the knapsack on his back.

And it means that when he opens his mouth around people from outside his bubble, he comes across as a condescending dick. It’s happened again and again on the campaign trail, despite what I presume are the best efforts of his handlers to teach him less counter-productive habits; it happened on a massive scale at that fundraiser, because he never meant those words to be heard by the hoi polloi. It happens when they send Ann out to be his surrogate, because she’s been living in the same bubble, a world where she and Mitt were “struggling to make ends meet” back when they were living off his stock portfolio.

During the 2008 campaign, I remember somebody writing a cute post wherein they pretended the presidential election was a piece of fanfic, and criticized it for Obama’s Mary Sue qualities and the OOC way John McCain was being written, betraying all his principles in a cynical bid for the win. If 2012 were a workshop story, I’d be bleeding ink all over the page, lambasting the writer for saddling the Republican party with such an unrealistic caricature of arrogant, wealthy, self-interested self-absorption as their candidate. Because even when I can explain Mitt Romney, I have trouble believing that this really what we’ve ended up with.

Writing Fight Scenes: Smooth Moves

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

I’ve said before that you don’t actually have to give a blow-by-blow description of your fight in order to write a good scene, and in fact you often don’t want to. Going into detail slows the action down and risks confusing a reader who can’t visualize the movement very well.

But sometimes, at key moments, it can be good to describe specific moves. The sequence that leads to somebody being killed or disarmed or knocked to the ground can be worth focusing on — a brief snapshot that shows a character’s desperation, competence, etc. So let’s talk for a moment about how you can work that out, even if you don’t have a lot of training.

Warning: it involves looking like a complete weirdo. 🙂

Kids: try this at home!

things I have forgotten

Dynamics.

Oh, I remember what they are. Pianissimo, piano, mezzo-piano, mezzo-forte, etc. But what do they sound like? How quiet is mezzo-piano? How much louder than that is mezzo-forte?

I know this is a matter of interpretation, not actual decibels. But I’ve lost my sense of proportion for such things. And it’s even more complicated when you’re playing a digital piano: this thing has a volume knob and you can adjust the touch, so what constitutes quiet vs. loud depends not only on what I do with my hands, but what settings I’ve got the instrument on. It’s going to take me a while before I re-develop my feel for the dynamics of the pieces I’ve been playing.

Also, I should mention in passing that I didn’t realize how accustomed I was to playing pieces out of instructional books until I started playing lots of new-to-me music that doesn’t have suggested fingerings marked on the page. <g> Howard Shore is a particular challenge on that front, or rather whoever arranged the Lord of the Rings score for piano is.

But I’ve had the Precious for nearly a month now, and I’ve played it virtually every day (barring when I was in Boston this past weekend — and even then, I managed to play a different piano one afternoon), so I think it’s safe to say that I’ll get plenty of practice in the months and years to come. 🙂

Lies and Prophecy

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and prophecy.

Kim thought majoring in divination would prepare her for the future. But even with her foresight warning her of trouble, she’s taken by surprise when an unknown force attacks Julian, her enigmatic classmate and friend. Her gifts can’t protect him against further attacks and an inexplicable string of disappearances . . . and if she’s reading the omens right, Julian isn’t the only one in danger.

Kim knows she isn’t ready for this. But if she wants to save Julian — and herself — she’ll have to prove her own prophecies wrong.

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present my Book View Cafe debut?

Lies and Prophecy is, as anyone who has been reading the “Welcome to Welton” scenes will know, an urban fantasy set in a version of our world where about half the adult population has active psychic gifts. (At least, “urban fantasy” is the short description for it. I have sometimes been known to refer to this book as “near future alternate history mildly post-apocalyptic semi-YA urban fantasy with some mystery and romance in and maybe a smidge of science fiction if you squint right.” But they don’t really have a category for that.)

It is also available for purchase! You can buy directly from BVC, in both epub and mobi formats, suitable for iPads and Nooks and Kindles and so on, or whatever your e-book reading device of choice may be. BVC is the best route to go, in terms of benefit to me-the-writer, but if you prefer to order from some other venue, you can get it through Amazon right now, and other e-book retailers in the near future. If you prefer a dead tree edition, there will be one of those, too, but that (alas) is going to take a little while longer to happen. I’ll definitely announce it here when that becomes available, though, probably with pictures of me hugging it and squeezing it and generally acting like Gollum.

See, this is the first novel I ever finished. It’s been through more revisions than I can count, over a period of (yikes) thirteen years, but it is still my first, and that means it is very near and dear to my heart. These are the characters that never quite left my head, the story I kept revisiting and refining. And now it is, at last, out there for other people to read. I am more happy than I can say, and I’d like to take a moment to thank the BVC crew in general, and those who produced this book in particular: my cover designer Amy Sterling Casil, my formatter Chris Dolley, my copy-editor David Levine, and most especially Sherwood Smith, who has been my BVC mentor since I first approached her at a con and said “I think I’d like to join your group.”

I’ll have more to say in upcoming days, but for now, I hope you enjoy the book. 🙂

I am an aunt!

Directly, that is, as opposed to by marriage. (I have been an aunt-by-marriage for about two years now.)

A multitude of congratulations to my brother and his wife on the birth of their son.

Welcome to Welton: Kim (11/11)

Earle’s dining hall was a low and sprawling place, claustrophobic enough that I’d avoided it until now. I preferred Hurst, whose floor-to-ceiling windows made it feel more open and pleasant. But Liesel had recruited me for a social project tonight, and it wouldn’t kill me to eat here once, before I swore off it for the rest of my undergraduate life.

The space didn’t make it easy to find people, though. Liesel rose up on her toes to scan the room, then dropped down and shrugged. “I don’t see him. Let’s get food, then try to grab a table.”

Read the rest at the Book View Cafe.

And that’s the last of them! But tune in tomorrow for an announcement . . . .

Welcome to Welton: Liesel (10/11)

Liesel could tell, even before she settled into her seat for the Cairo Accords lecture, that the guy who always sat next to her had something he wanted to say. No empathy needed; she could read it in his posture, much more upright than his usual slouch, and the way he kept looking at her sidelong. But she’d been delayed on her way to class by a call from her mother, and there was no time for him to say anything before Professor Banerjee brought up the display and began lecturing.

She hoped he wasn’t going to ask her out. Robert wasn’t the type of guy who interested her—and besides, Michele’s flirting had continued well after Carmen stopped eating lunch with them. They’d gotten together the previous night to talk about the possibility of forming a Wiccan circle, if they could find enough other students they wanted to include, but the conversation had continued for a good hour and a half after that, long after Liesel should have gone home.

Read the rest at the Book View Cafe.

One more to go! That will show up on Monday. And then regular blogging will resume, I promise.

Welcome to Welton: Kim (9/11)

A bout of shivering seized me, and my jaw ached as I clenched it to keep my teeth from chattering. Minnesota was not Georgia: I knew that, and yet here I was, soaking wet and outside late on a windy and none-too-warm night. All because I couldn’t let go of tradition.

It started when I was twelve. My gifts had manifested about a month earlier, and were still volatile enough that, although I’d enjoyed my birthday party, I felt twitchy and less than fully in control of myself. After my friends left, I went for a swim in our backyard pool, and ended up floating there for a good hour, thinking about everything in my life: manifestation, how I’d changed, where I was going. The next year, although I didn’t need the calming, I decided to to do it again. And every year since then, the same.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

I’m going out of town tomorrow morning, so it’s possible I won’t remember to post the link to the penultimate scene before I leave. But by now I figure you all know the drill, right?

Welcome to Welton: Robert (8/11)

Everyone knew the urban legends, of course. The freshman empath who snapped under the pressure of her roommate’s stress and, depending on the narrative variant, either drove the offender mad in a sudden burst of telepathic fury, or bashed her head in with a paperweight. According to the empath who sat next to Robert in their class on the Cairo Accords, there was no true historical incident behind the tales . . . but college was trying enough, and the psychic control of most eighteen-year-olds still imperfect enough, that breakdowns of a less violent sort did indeed occur.

Robert—who knew quite well that he had the empathic sensitivity of a whelk—did not expect to have any such difficulties himself.

But as it transpired, empathy was unnecessary, when living with a highly-stressed wilder.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

Welcome to Welton: Kim (7/11)

Several dozen of my fellow freshmen had shown up to the first meeting of the Div Club. A month and a half into the quarter, that number had dropped sharply. We might not be as dangerous as the pyros, but we weren’t as exciting, either.

At least, to anybody who wasn’t a hard-core divination geek. People still showed to the occasional meeting, and Akila told me they got lots of messages from students wanting to set up individual readings, but when it came to regular attendance, there were only maybe thirty of us—freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors.

When I mentioned that to Liesel, she just grinned and said, “Thirty of you, eh?”

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

This is the scene for which I had to invent a new form of cartomancy, very late one night, because I didn’t want to use tarot. Hopefully it’s at least vaguely plausible?

update on the Togashi Dynasty

I just sent in a draft of my L5R chapter, after beating my head bloody against it for the last week or so. Note to self: when estimating the amount of work involved in writing a chapter for a game book, word count on its own is not an adequate metric. This is not, repeat, not like writing fiction. It’s more like writing your undergraduate thesis.

I even have a bibliography. 4th edition books consulted in the writing of this chapter: core, Emerald Empire, Enemies of the Empire, Great Clans, Imperial Histories, Book of Air. Books consulted from previous editions: Way of the Dragon, Creatures of Rokugan, Legend of the Burning Sands. Also the L5R wiki. 4th edition books not consulted: Strongholds of the Empire. (And Second City, but that’s because my gaming store doesn’t have it in yet. Otherwise you bet your ass I’d have been eagerly looking up just what an Isawa Archaeologist does.)

Now I think I need to go feed myself and maybe drool at the TV for a little bit while I wait for my brain to regrow. I need it for some of these other projects whose deadlines are breathing down my neck . . . .

Welcome to Welton: Liesel (6/11)

“So, have any of you managed to spot him yet?” Carmen asked, sliding into the last chair at the lunch table.

Liesel shoved a forkful of salad in her mouth to keep from sighing. She liked Michele, a French student she’d met through the International Students’ Union. She liked one of Michele’s two roommates, Sara, who was sitting next to her. But Carmen . . . .

“Spot who?” Sara asked.

Read the rest at Book View Cafe.

And if you missed last week’s posts, you can read the first five scenes here.

last reminder

I should have said this before, but don’t forget that the Pe ‘Sla project is “flexible funding.” They’ll get the pledged money whether or not they hit their goal, so if you looked at it and thought “I shouldn’t bother, since it’s not going to happen anyway,” then please go back and bother.