The DWJ Project: Enchanted Glass

When Andrew Hope’s grandfather dies, he leaves Andrew in charge of his magical field-of-care — with very little instruction as to what to do with it. And when a boy named Aidan Cain shows up on Andrew’s doorstep, looking for safety from the inhuman things chasing him, the two of them have to work together to sort out just what is happening in the village of Melstone.

This is one of Jones’ newest books, surpassed only by Earwig and the Witch, which is one of the only things of hers I haven’t read at all. It’s a splendid example of two of the things Jones did beautifully well, which are vivid characterization coupled with a dry wit. The opening pages, which describe Andrew trying to cope with the housekeeper and gardener for Melstone House, are just hilarious: slightly larger-than-life (quite literally, in the case of the vegetables Mr. Stock keeps dumping in the kitchen as punishment), but still grounded in something very real. And both of the protagonists, Andrew and Aidan, are the kind of sensible people I have always loved in her books. (It makes me wonder, in fact, how much of my preference for sensible characters stems from reading her work. Not all of it — Cimorene from Dealing with Dragons deserves some credit, too — but I suspect quite a bit.) First reading this book when I was thirty instead of thirteen means those characters will never occupy the deep place in my heart some of her others have, but I have very little to quibble with, where they’re concerned.

My quibbles have to do with the world, which hints at all kinds of fascinating things, but never goes into enough detail to satisfy me. For an explanation of that, follow me behind the cut.

(more…)

I suppose I should tell you . . . .

I’m in Hawaii. ^_^

I couldn’t mention it before, because it would have spoiled the surprise for my mother, but my father arranged to ship me, kniedzw, my brother, and my brother’s wife out to Hawaii for a long weekend to celebrate my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary with them. As I type this, I can pause to look out over my balcony to the lagoon down below, where yesterday I swam and basked in the sun; just past it is the sea, where in a few hours I’ll be going whale-watching.

(Yeah, I might be gloating just a bit.)

Quite apart from the beautiful surroundings, it’s great to be able to hang out with my family like this. The last pure vacation the four of us took together was also in Hawaii, nineteen years ago; the last vacation-with-another-purpose was a year or two later, when my brother was looking at colleges, and we took it as an excuse to go sightseeing in California. We see each other on the holidays, but it’s lovely to have this kind of time, where nobody has to cook or run errands or do any of the other things that can make the holidays stressful.

And, y’know, the surroundings don’t hurt. 🙂 Especially in light of the fact that the Bay Area is currently receiving a lot of desperately-needed, but not terribly fun to walk around in, rain.

So huzzah for my parents and forty years of happy marriage. May they continue happy for many more years to come.

It had to happen sometime

Last month, for the first time since we launched the group blog in August of 2007, I missed my post at SF Novelists.

But I’m back this month! With the first of what turned out to be a two-part thing (since otherwise my post would have been unreadably long), on how competence is hot. (With bonus links to several people trying to pose like the men and women on book covers.)

Comment over there, no login needed, etc, but if you’re a first-timer please wait for me to fish your comment out of the moderation queue.

Writing Fight Scenes: Point of View

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

So, I’ve blathered on at length about how to imagine a fight scene for a story: who’s fighting, and why, and where, and with what, and how they’re doing it, and so on.

How do you get that onto the page?

Point of view seems a useful place to begin this discussion. It’s generally already been decided by the time you get to the scene; if the whole book has been in third person limited from the protagonist’s perspective, you’re unlikely to hop to first just for the fight. (You could do it, as some kind of avant-garde trick — but 99.9% of the time, you won’t.) So, what are you working with: first, second (unlikely), or third? Third limited or omniscient? If limited, then whose third are we in?

For a story with only one pov, again, that’s probably already been decided. But if you have multiple viewpoint characters, and more than one of them is present for the fight, you have a choice to make.

The best answer may not be what you assume.

a better (or rather, worse) metric

Remember how I mentioned before that I wanted to improve my story production this year? Well, I haven’t really made progress on that; I haven’t written anything new (yet). But I have sent something new out, that’s been sitting around waiting to be revised for a year or more.

When I went to add it to my submissions log, I noticed something . . . poor-ish.

Yes, the point (as I said in my previous post) is to sell things, not to submit them. But while the last three pieces I finished and sent out sold to the first place I submitted them — yay! — that isn’t the whole story. All three of those were basically written to order, under conditions where I more or less knew they were sold before I started working on them. The last time I sent out a story that wasn’t solicited and pre-sold?

Was April of 2010.

And it isn’t because editors have been beating down my door with invitations. Three such situations in nearly two years is nice, but not exactly the sort of thing the leads to some authors of my acquaintance saying “I’m going to have to start turning editors down; I’m already overcommitted.” More like, the only times I’ve been able to prod myself into actual short story productivity is when I know the only thing standing between me and an almost-guaranteed sale is my own lack of effort.

This isn’t a self-esteem thing. Obviously I know I can sell stories, if I bother to write them. And it isn’t a lack of inspiration thing, either; one look at my (growing) list of unwritten story ideas would cure any notion of that. I’m not sure what kind of thing it is, really. It may be part and parcel of the fatigue issue I think I’ve mentioned in passing here; writing novels has been harder, too, for at least as long as I’ve been such a short-story slacker, and while I can’t prove that has anything to do with the way I faceplant for a nap almost every day (which is a more recent development), I’m hoping that fixing the latter will lead to miraculous improvements in the former.

Anyway. Mostly I want to pat myself on the back for finally sending out “Mad Maudlin,” after way too much time spent sitting on it. I have another story in similar circumstances (which probably would have been revised and sent out yonks ago, if I could just come up with a title for the damn thing), and I’m going to push myself to get some new things written. This, at least, is a start.

The DWJ Project: Minor Arcana

There’s only one story in this collection I haven’t read already, but I still feel justified in counting it as a book read, because the story in question is The True State of Affairs, which eats up about half of the pages. I don’t have a word count for it, but it is probably squarely in novella territory, if not edging toward short novel. Either way, it’s certainly longer than some of the DWJ stories that have been published independently (like Wild Robert).

It’s fortuitous timing that I chose to read it now. I started it months ago, but kept not getting into it; now, reading it through, I realize it is apparently a verrrrrrry peripheral Dalemark story. (As in, it had sort of a Dalemark-ish feel early on, and then there’s one place where it uses that name directly.) It’s hard to tell where it’s supposed to fit into Dalemark chronology, though. They have steam engines, though not for practical use, which suggests it can’t be too long before the “present” day of that series (i.e. Mitt and Moril’s time), because that’s when Alk is about to set off an industrial revolution. Also, there is no king, which means it has to be before Amil the Great, because Dalemark is a monarchy from his time up through Maewen’s, where everything is modern. But I don’t recall hearing any of these people referenced in the novels — or even the places, though there I may just be overlooking things — so it’s hard to slot into position.

Look away if you don’t want spoilers.

(more…)

intersectionality in action

Tonight, I realized something I’m not very happy about.

There was a guy outside the grocery store, panhandling. I had to pass him both entering and leaving. And both times, I looked away and walked right past him without saying anything or slowing down.

And then I realized, If I were a man, I wouldn’t have done that.

I don’t like ignoring panhandlers and other people on the street. It erases them, and I’m sure they get that far too often. But at the same time, I know that if I had made eye contact, smiled, said anything . . . my odds of being sexually harassed would have shot up like a rocket.

It isn’t inevitable, of course. Not every panhandler would take that as an invitation to more. It’s happened to me often enough, however, that my reflex is to avoid interacting with strange men on the street, just out of self-defense. And I say that as someone who’s never been raped, or even harassed to an extent I would call traumatic; the worst was enough to put me off my stride for half an hour or so, but in the grand scheme of things, I know that’s not nearly as bad as it gets. But there’s always the little voice in my head reminding me that I’m female, and it could get worse, and so it’s safer to not engage.

(I do more often make eye contact, etc. with female panhandlers. They don’t set off the defensive reflexes in the same way.)

This bothers me a lot, now that I’ve noticed it so directly. If I were my husband — a six-foot-three man — I’d be a lot more likely to acknowledge those people, even if I didn’t give them a handout on the spot. And yet, I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to chuck this pattern of behavior, either. There is no good solution, I fear, except to live in a utopian society where a) women don’t have to fear harassment, b) people don’t have to beg on the streets, or c) better yet, both.

I may try engaging more, anyway. I can withstand sketchy, unwanted compliments, for the sake of the people who don’t respond that way. I live in a pretty safe area, so I don’t think I’m likely to get assaulted just because I decided not to ignore somebody. But that isn’t always going to be true, and so this defensive habit is likely to stay — and I really wish that weren’t the case.

Things I want to improve: production in the new year

I didn’t publish a whole lot last year, in comparison with the previous five or so. With Fate Conspire, Dancing the Warrior (the doppelganger novella), and three short stories (“Two Pretenders,” “Love, Cayce,” and “Coyotaje”). The forecast isn’t good for this year, either, because I didn’t write a whole lot, either: A Natural History of Dragons, Dancing the Warrior, “Coyotaje,” and a novelette I can’t tell you about yet, but which has already been sold. In other words, everything I wrote vanished from the pipeline pretty much as soon as I finished it.

I’ve posted about that latter bit before, reminding myself that selling stories is the goal, not submitting them. Still, I have only four things in the submission queue right now, and one or more of those probably ought to be retired. Even if I sold all four of them right now, and all four saw print this year — both of which are unlikely — that’s not a lot of new publications compared to some past years, and it leaves me with nothing for next year.

Okay. So I need to write more short fiction. I’ve vowed this before, and met with moderate success; let’s try that again. Simple to say, not so simple to do, but putting it here where the internets can see it should help.

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.