Halley’s Comet returns!

The one in my book, not the one in the sky.

Just got confirmation today that A Star Shall Fall will be getting a mass-market release in October of this year. So if you prefer your novels in smaller and/or cheaper format, mark the date on your calendar!

(This is actually the first time a book of mine has gotten proper release in a new physical format. There are ebooks of all of them, and the Onyx Court novels got picked up by the Science Fiction Book Club, which does hardcover copies, but this is shiny and new.)

Holmes and Watson need new punctuation

Saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows tonight, and had much great fun. Is it just me, or have we seen a tendency in the last 5-10 years for sequels to actually be better than the first movie of a series? If so, I attribute it to these being planned as series from the start, rather than the sequel being tacked on after the first one does well, and also on the way a second movie doesn’t have to spend all that tedious time setting up the characters and situation, but can just jump right into the story.

Anyway. That actually isn’t what I want to talk about here. Instead, I want to talk about slash, and how utterly inadequate I find that word for describing the situation with Holmes and Watson in this movie.

(I’ll try to keep this relatively spoiler-free, but I can’t promise about the comments.)

See, here’s the thing. To me — and I know people use the term in different ways, so this is just my own usage — slash is the process of taking the homoerotic subtext of a story and treating it as text. And one of the reasons I can’t call AGoS slashy is because it isn’t subtext. You simply cannot look at the interactions between Holmes and Watson in that film and think the story is not deliberately presenting you with two men who love each other very deeply, even if they can’t quite unbend enough to express that affection in direct terms.

The other reason I don’t want to call the film slashy is because, although you can find abundant bait there for imagining Holmes and Watson in a sexual relationship, I don’t read them that way. Partly this is because I get frustrated sometimes at how the slash lens tends to filter out all other possibilities for male emotional intimacy; we can’t let guys be friends or enemies even brothers without also sexualizing the relationship. That actually frustrates me sometimes, on par with my frustration over TV shows that like to use slashy subtext to engage the fans, but will never actually deliver on those wink-wink-nudge-nudge promises. (We can have slash, but almost never The Actual Gay.) Anyway, getting back to Holmes and Watson — sure, there’s certainly space there for reading it in that light. But I’m more interested in the story of two friends, because it’s a kind of friendship I feel I don’t see very often these days, where it isn’t all macho fellow-soldier camaraderie, but something with real vulnerability on both sides.

I don’t have a good term for what I see between them, in the first movie and especially the second. The closest I can come is a term my friends and I have used sometimes, “hetero lifemates,” for two straight people of the same sex whose friendship is of the lifelong kind. But it doesn’t quite hit the target I’m aiming at, maybe just because it’s unwieldy. Neither Holmes nor Watson would ever say it openly — let’s face it; they’re both late nineteenth-century men, and one of them is a rampaging narcissist — but they care as deeply about each other as either of them (okay, Watson) is capable of caring about anyone of the opposite sex. I feel like I need to resort to Greek here, except I don’t actually know which word I want. Agape? Philia? Eros? (Wikipedia claims that one doesn’t have to be sexual. Actual Hellenists, please weigh in.)

Whatever you call it, I’m fascinated by the way the movie embraces it, and does so without totally sidelining Mary Morstan. She doesn’t play a terribly prominent role, but they do make it clear that Watson isn’t marrying her just because it’s the sort of thing he’s expected to do. She and Watson have their thing, and he and Holmes have their thing, and it’s my sincere hope for all three characters that they manage to settle down into a dynamic that doesn’t force Watson to choose between them. Mary’s willingness to roll with various events suggests it may be possible.

I can’t refer to the guys as Holmes/Watson, though. They need new punctuation, something other than a slash. Any suggestions? 🙂 And, more to the point — what should we call this kind of thing, if it isn’t slash?

Yuuuuuuuuuletide

And we are done with anonymity; the authors have been revealed! I can now talk about what I did for the last month, after finishing novel revisions. 😀

findabair, did you peek or something?! 😉 Because you managed to throw a dart at a board 2598 fics big, and hit my assignment. That’s right, I matched with ladyanneboleyn on Cirque du Soleil’s show Alegría, and as a result, wrote “If You Have No Light.” It’s possibly one of the weirder things I’ve ever produced; while I adore Cirque, Alegría isn’t the one I’m the most familiar with, and so I had to force my brain to do a lot of high-speed composting of all the beautiful-but-strange things floating around the margins of that show. I really do like some of the touches I managed to put into that one, though, and I kind of hope Cirque gets requested again in the future. There really is so much hinted-at story in what they do, that deserved to be teased out more.

Next I wrote a treat, and here I’m cackling about who didn’t guess. Not one but two friends pinged me to say “YOU MUST READ THIS STORY IT’S AWESOME” . . . and linked me to my own fic! <chortle> The tale in question is “The Rest,” which arose out of reading a few prompts for The Sandbaggers, and then one for Casino Royale, which reminded me that SIS = MI6, and a crossover promptly fell out of my head. It probably loses something if you don’t know the first source (or the second, though that’s a much smaller percentage of the population — hi, maratai!), but I hope I managed to interest a few more people in that brilliant, brilliant show.

Then, ladies and gents, I had Angst. I even posted to the Yuletide community about it. I had this idea, see, but it was entirely possible somebody else had the same idea, and if that somebody else was the assigned writer I was going to feel like I’d copied their prom dress . . . and then five minutes after I posted that, the request came up for a pinch hit, and I just about sprained something grabbing it. 😀

Normally, of course, I’d say that two writers can produce very different results from the same idea. In this case, however, there was a lot less wiggle room than usual, because the idea in question was “The Tough Guide to Yuletide.” WOOOO, I managed to write one of this year’s hits! I sort of thought that might be the case, since Yuletide meta is one of the things people tend to like, but I did not anticipate the scale of my success. Prior to this, my most widely-read story was “Desert Rain,” my Elfquest pinch hit from last year. That got 223 hits over the course of the subsequent year. “The Tough Guide to Yuletide”? Had nearly 1400 before the author reveal. Holy cats, y’all.

The other funny thing here is that I had a panic attack of second-guessing: what if my recipient wasn’t all that interested in Yuletide meta? Just to cover my bases, I ran off and wrote a treat fic for the same person, also based on The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: “A Special Limited-Time Offer,” wherein I (lovingly . . . for the most part) mock the current wave of “gritty” epic fantasy. So yeah, two of this year’s three Tough Guide fics are my work, and both got a lot of love.

I also got a lot of love for — let’s see if LJ herniates on this text — “待龙纹身的女孩 (Dài lóng wénshēn de nǚhái) ,” a Mulan fic based on the “Twisted Disney Princesses” fan-art series. (If you can’t read that, it’s characters followed by “Dai long wenshen de nuhai” with a lot of diacritical marks, which is, according to the hippo who helped me, the official Mandarin translation for “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”) The fact that I’m playing a Togashi monk in a Legend of the Five Rings game had nothing to do with my interest in that one, nosirree . . . Obvious title is obvious, but I figured I could be a little more creative, and avoid the odds of duplication with somebody else’s fic, if I took it out of English.

And finally, one final treat squeezed out at the last minute, because I’d seen the request weeks before and loved the concept enough that dammit, I wasn’t going to let the chance slip by. “A Devilish Exercise” was inspired by a prompt for a Hamlet crossover with Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus (and ended up waaaaay darker than the other fic written from the same thing). The bad part? I, er, mentioned in my notes on the fic that I had to stop the story where I did in order to prevent it from turning into a giant Hamlet AU . . . and then every comment I got urged me to go ahead and write the giant Hamlet AU.

The first chapter of that has just gone up.

I had a lot of success this Yuletide; not only did three of my fics get more hits in the last week than my most popular fic before did in a year, but I was lucky enough to see almost all of them recced on the Yuletide member community, several of them more than once. Some of that, I think, is more a matter of fandom than anything else; a lot more people are familiar with, say, Mulan — or Yuletide meta/the works of Diana Wynne Jones — than with the Gabriel Knight computer games. Still, pretty satisfying. 🙂

Almost forgot the Aurors deadline . . . .

Heh. Just realized today that in all the madness of writing six fics for Yuletide, I almost forgot about the challenge starlady38 and I are running. The page for that is here, if you missed it before but like the idea, and you don’t have to have participated in the prompt-generation phrase to write fics for any of the prompts there now. (You do, however, need an AO3 account; e-mail me if you want an invitation, which lets you bypass the queue.)

(Also, while I’m still on fanfic-related matters, I should mention that I won’t be replying to any guesses as to what I wrote for Yuletide until after the reveal. But I may offer some kind of prize if there are any correct guesses.)

Happy New Year, all! I’ll see you in 2012.

The DWJ Project: The Crown of Dalemark

Conclusion of the Dalemark Quartet. Here we jump all around the Dalemark timeline, dwelling mostly in the “present day” of Moril and Mitt, but spending part of the narrative about two hundred years later, and drawing in components from the more distant past of The Spellcoats.

As a series conclusion goes, it’s . . . odd. For one thing, as I mentioned in the post on The Spellcoats, this book came out fourteen years after its predecessor. That’s quite a long time to wait for a finale, and I’m not sure why the pause happened — especially given the way things were left hanging in some of the previous books. Cart and Cwidder ends on a mostly-resolved note (sorry, pun not intended); there’s clearly room for more to be told, but if that was the last of it, we’d be okay. Drowned Ammet more obviously leaves things hanging, with Mitt making promises for the future that don’t get addressed in his book. The Spellcoats is the most open-ended of the lot, but I’ll leave the statement at that, to avoid spoilers.

This isn’t your usual sort of last book; the stories it draws together are quite widely scattered. Even Moril and Mitt, who at least exist in the same century, hail from opposite ends of Dalemark, and have never met each other before this story begins. We also get a new character in the form of Maewen, a girl from the future of Dalemark, and quite a bit of the history being addressed is hers — but although she’s a central character, the book doesn’t belong wholly to her. It’s as much Mitt’s book, or possibly more. This leads to some weird structural elements. To say more about those, though, I’ll have to get into spoilers.

Cut time!

The DWJ Project: The Spellcoats

Third book in the Dalemark Quartet, which steps way back in history for the founding of the kingdom, when an invading army and an evil mage threaten the land.

A lot of people have cited this as their favorite book of the series, and I can see why. Tanaqui and her siblings are a great DWJ family; they don’t all get along, but they’re deeply loyal to one another, and all contribute in their individual ways. And the worldbuilding for this novel is especially rich: the Undying, the weaving of the rugcoats, the mages binding their spirits with their gowns, and all the rest of it. The setting we see is very plausibly an earlier society than the Dalemark of the “present-day” books (the ones with Moril and Mitt), and yet some of the things that happen along the way aren’t the obvious — because Jones is good at making things more complex than you expect at first glance.

Everything else is spoilers.

Locus Podcast on, um, everything?

I thought I had linked to this here before, but if so, I can’t find it.

During World Fantasy, Karen Burnham of Locus sat me and Kari Sperring (la_marquise_de_) down in front of a microphone to talk about a topic of our choosing. We chose Kari’s “history is not a theme park” rant, and went from there, to, uh, everywhere. Subjects touched on included: The Three Musketeers, Aztecs and cultural relativism, Biblical archaeology, hemming clothing, stew, Mongolian steppe ponies, Minoan murals, authenticity in history, hippie elves, late medieval English blacksmithing guild laws, the Great London Plague of 1665, trousers and pigs, Biblical archaeology, kicking postmodernism in the head, seventeenth-century Parisian mud, telepathic wombats, and “the answer to almost everything is turnips.”

All these things and more await you on the Locus website. You can listen to the file there or download it for later hearing. We ramble on for about an hour and twelve minutes; Karen said afterward that normally she waits for a lull in the conversation, then steps in to say “well, that about wraps things up.” With us, she had to go in with a crowbar, or we would have kept rolling for another hour. We enjoyed it a lot — well, certainly I did — and I hope you do, too.

Yuletide guessing game

I don’t know how many of you reading this participated in Yuletide (or at least have been reading through some percentage of the collection), but I might as well toss out some bait for interested parties to try and guess what I wrote.

Nota bene: do NOT go look at my page on the AO3 to see what I’ve written in the past. There’s a bug that causes the fandoms my stories are in to be displayed, even for the stories that are still anonymous. It pretty much gives the game away.

This year I went a bit overboard and produced six stories. (This is a bit of a problem; last year I wrote four, which means next year my OCD brain is going to want me to write eight. At least.) One was my assignment, one was a pinch-hit, and four were treats. Several of those were supposed to be stocking stuffers (meaning less than a thousand words), but they all ended up higher: four were in the 1000-2000 word range, one was 2000-3000, and one was 3000-4000.

I wrote for three stage productions of one stripe or another, two movies, one TV show, one book, and one piece of art. If those numbers don’t seem to add up to six, that’s because three of the fics are crossovers, and I wrote in one fandom twice. Only one is a fandom I’d written in prior to this Yuletide.

Any guesses?

(And yes, we intend for regular posting here to resume before long.)

What I Got for Yuletide (a bit belated)

I’ve been extremely uncommunicative lately — and my apologies if I owe you an e-mail, which is quite a lot of you — but I’m breaking radio silence just before I go home to link you all to the story I got for Yuletide, which is absolutely beautiful.

“The Cautery Wind” combines two of my Elfquest-related suggestions: for my assigned writer to make up their own tribe in the World of Two Moons, and to give backstory for one of the original four tribes from canon (in this case, the Sun Folk). It’s darker than more Elfquest, but in an appropriate way; it picks up on the threads of darkness that are already in the series, and looks at them head-on. The frame is Savah telling a story that Skywise and Timmain need to hear, and it contains more lovely notes than I can list about what it means for the Mother of Memory to want to forget something, what it means for Skywise to have changed the way he did in Kings of the Broken Wheel, what the relationship between Skywise and Timmain is about, and what the differences (and similarities) are between elves and humans. To name just a few of the things I loved about it.

The story probably won’t mean a lot to people who haven’t read the series, but if you know Elfquest, go read this story. It’s a wonderful fan-made addendum to the canon.

progress, for realz

Got a draft of my Yuletide story last night. It’s off to be read by fresher eyes than mine, and then I’ll revise it, and get the whole shebang posted not quite as far in advance of the deadline as I’d initially hoped. 🙂

On the basis of what I wrote last year, I find myself feeling bad that this story is so short, and will certainly be shorter than at least one of the treats I’m thinking of writing. I sort of feel like it, being my assignment, should be the longest thing I produce for Yuletide. Which is silly, of course: any given idea has a natural length (or range thereof), and bigger has no correlation with better. But still.

I’m really happy with my title, though. It came to me about halfway through the process, with no effort at all; the ones that do that are usually my favorites. Titles I have to sweat for rarely end up feeling more than adequate to me. (With Fate Conspire is something of a special case, given the process behind that one. It was more work than any other title I’ve ever put on a piece of writing, but I was very pleased with it in the end.)

The DWJ Project: Drowned Ammet

If I didn’t have Christmas carols stuck in my head, I would have been singing Les Mis to myself for half this book. 🙂

The Dalemark Quartet continues, with a book that takes on more directly the issue of oppression in the South Dales. Mitt’s family is driven from their farm to the city of Holand by oppressive rents, and his father gets involved with a revolutionary society called the Free Holanders, which in turn ends up recruiting Mitt and his mother Milda, too. But when the Free Holanders decide to finally do something other than sit around and talk, things start to go very wrong very quickly.

That’s half the story; the other half belongs to Hildy and Ynen, the grandchildren of the Earl of Holand. (70% of the names in this book begin with H. Hildrida and Hadd and Harl and Harchad and Holand and Hobin and hell if I can remember the rest.) As much as it sucks to be a commoner outside the palace, it isn’t all sunshine and roses being a noble inside it, either; you never wonder where your next meal is coming from, but you do get sold off into political marriages and watch as your grandfather hangs Northerners whose only real crime was to be driven into harbor by a storm.

This book is stronger on both of the fronts that I felt were lacking in Cart and Cwidder; the plot has a lot more momentum, and the emotions are much more strongly laid out. Sure, I wanted to kick the Free Holanders in the teeth for being so blind they couldn’t stage a revolution with both hands and a map — and sometimes I wanted to kick Hobin, too, for failing to more effectively point out why joining them was a bad idea — but it’s entirely realistic stupidity, which means it frustrates me, but doesn’t make for a bad story.

Other things I liked, before we LJ-cut for spoilers: Poor Old Ammet and Libby Beer. Which is to say, the tradition of making those two figures and throwing them in the harbor is fabulous. Like the word “cwidder,” it feels very plausibly real, and ends up (as the title suggests) being very relevant to the story. I also liked the largely Ruritanian feel of the story; what with the revolutionaries and all, I half-believe that if you set sail across that ocean, you’ll wash up in Westmark. 🙂

The rest goes behind the cut.

Motifs I like, done right.

The DWJ Project: Cart and Cwidder

This is the first book of the Dalemark Quartet, which I know I read many years ago, but out of order and sufficiently spaced out that I don’t think I realized at the time the books made up a set.

In part, this is because — although I’ve afterwards thought of them as a Proper Series — these books are no more closely linked than, say, Howl’s Moving Castle and Castle in the Air. They take place in the same setting, and maybe once I get further on (I’m in the process of re-reading Drowned Ammet right now) there will be more immediate linkages, but so far there’s no sense in which any of these books is a direct sequel to one before. (The exception may come in The Crown of Dalemark, which I want to say builds on all three of its predecessors. Then again, I haven’t read the thing in probably twenty years, so my instinct is not what you’d call reliable.)

The other reason I didn’t notice, the first (and I think only) time I read these books, that they belonged together, was because . . . they never really made an impression on me. I know some people love the Dalemark series; there are a number of Yuletide requests for it this year. Glancing at them, though, they all seem to be for later books: I didn’t see a single one for Cart and Cwidder, though I might have overlooked it. I think it’s entirely possible I’ll like the later ones better — Drowned Ammet is already off to a better start — but yeah, this one didn’t do a lot for me. It’s one of the earlier books, published in 1975, and it feels like it never quite hit its stride.

Before I get to unpacking that, though, a plot summary. The title refers to the fact that the protagonist, Moril, belongs to a family of traveling singers; they travel in a cart, and he and his father both play the cwidder, which is (as near as I can tell) a made-up stringed instrument, or maybe just a made-up name for a stringed instrument. (“Cwidder” is a reasonably plausible morph of “guitar,” to my eye, though the image on my book cover looks more like a lute.) They’re traveling in the South Dales, which suffer under a repressive set of earls, and trying to make their way to the North Dales, where Moril and the other children were born, and people can live free.

Now we can move on to the spoilers.

And the LJ-cut to hide them.

Yuletide fic is a go! Now where is it going . . . .?

I’ve finally started on my Yuletide fic — started properly, I mean, and not just the fifty words I slapped down a few days ago because I felt like I really ought to have made more progress by now. Found the right tone for the story today, and at least some of the right format; I say “some of” because this is a decidedly odd story, from a decidedly odd source, and it remains to be seen whether the approach I’m taking will sustain the thousand-word minimum for Yuletide. Possibly not, in which case I’ll need to find something else to slide into the break-points that have been appearing along the way. But I’m not yet sure what that should be.

Structure is so often the kicker, ain’t it? I’ve started a treat, too, because I got mugged by an idea for something else, and that one mostly needs me to figure out what beats have to happen, in what order. Now that my subconscious has chewed on my assignment enough to start swallowing some of it (ew — not the best metaphor ever), the treat is going on the back-burner, but I think both of them are going to turn out very well, in very different ways.

Clockwork Phoenix is now an ebook!

Mike Allen (time_shark) has done yeoman work, converting the first volume of the Clockwork Phoenix anthology series to ebook format. This is, you may recall, the home of “A Mask of Flesh,” which I keep wanting to call “one of my Mesoamerican fantasy stories” until I remember that I haven’t actually gotten any of the other ones in shape to submit anywhere, let alone publish.

The rest of the series (CP, not those stories — though maybe them, too) will follow in time, but for now you can get the first volume on the Kindle. If you prefer pixels to dead trees, head on over and take a look!

The travel map of my family

I mentioned a while ago the travel opportunities I’ve been fortunate enough to have. It made me curious about the rest of my family, too, so when my parents were here for Thanksgiving, I sat down with them, my brother, and my sister-in-law, and made up several maps. Check below the cut to see where we’ve gone.

Edit: the maps may not load in all browsers. I can’t see them in Firefox, but they show up in IE.

I meant it when I said we'd gone a fair number of places.

The DWJ Project: Year of the Griffin

This is the third book in the “Fantasyland” set, following on Dark Lord of Derkholm, about eight years after the end of that book. It is less closely linked to Tough Guide to Fantasyland, though; the tours are done, and the world is sorting itself back into some kind of order, when Derk’s youngest griffin daughter Elda goes off to wizard college.

As I said before, I’m a sucker for the younger generation finding out just what they’re capable of. As a result, I really like Year of the Griffin, just for watching the protagonists deal with each other’s problems — Claudia’s jinx, the assassins after Felim, the dwarven rebellion that sent Ruskin, and so on. It’s amazing what you can do with a card catalogue and a bit of intellectual curiosity . . . .

I kind of want to kick Corkoran in the head for being so obsessed with his moonshot, even if I totally believe in that dynamic, academically speaking — the professor who’s more concerned with his pet project than with teaching. Wehrmacht I want to kick even more, for sheer incompetence. But they aren’t generally malevolent (not like Mr. Chesney in Dark Lord), and I’m not expected to sympathize with them as protagonists, so I can deal with that impulse. I quite Elda and Lukin and Olga and Claudia and Felim and Ruskin, and that’s the part that matters.