The Togashi Dynasty, Part One: Founding

I’ve said before that the setting for Legend of the Five Rings is really well-developed, such that you can have all sorts of fun messing with it. The most recent book for the fourth edition supports this in interesting ways; in addition to giving all kinds of historical info, it has sidebars scattered throughout, suggesting AU scenarios that might have resulted if events had gone differently.

One of those concerns the founding of the Empire. Canonically — for those who don’t know — nine kami, the children of Lady Sun and Lord Moon, fell to earth (and one of them fell through the earth into Hell, where he became corrupted). The remaining eight gathered mortal followers and held a tournament amongst themselves to decide who would rule this realm. Hantei won, and the other seven founded the Great Clans, and that was how Rokugan got started.

The sidebar in Imperial Histories asks, what if a different kami had won?

It gives a few sentences for each of the other kami, reminding you of their personalities, and outlining the general flavor that would have resulted if Doji or Hida or whoever had set the tone for all of Rokugan. The one that caught my eye the most was this:

If Togashi had been destined to defeat Hantei, he would have built an Empire far different from anything imagined by his siblings — a place of mystery and enigma, where religious contemplation and individual enlightenment were the highest goods. A GM who wishes to make Rokugan closer to the sort of mystical martial arts setting depicted in many Asian films might find a Togashi Dynasty suitable to the task.

Granted, I am playing a Dragon PC (a member of the Clan that kami founded in canonical history), and a Togashi monk to boot. But I think those lines would look shiny to me even if I weren’t, because I’m a fan of movies like The Bride With White Hair (which is the first example that leapt to mind). And so my brain immediately started playing with this notion. How could you redesign L5R for a timeline in which Togashi won?

I’m splitting this into at least two parts because the more I think about it, the more interesting notions come to mind. Everyone, and L5R geeks in particular, are invited to hop in with comments and suggestions. For this first part, I’ll start with the founding of the Empire and the Great Clans.

Trying to minimize the amount of stuff you have to design from scratch, with mixed success.

A Natural History of Dragons: Giveaway the First

Just laid this out piecemeal on Twitter; here it is in less truncated form.

I’m chewing over potential titles for the second book of Isabella’s memoirs. I want it to sound Victorian and travelogue-ish, and/or to potentially echo something having to do with sub-Saharan Africa (which is the region I’m taking as my model for this installment). My tongue-in-cheek placeholder is “Mrs. Camherst, I Presume,” but that’s not great as a title, hence looking for a replacement.

Right now I’m charmed by a pattern that showed up in Victorian travel-writing, exemplified by “Along the River Limpopo, With Gun and Camera.” The whole thing is unwieldy, but maybe a “With X and Y” phrase? If I can find suitable nouns to plug into it. (And if I can shut up the part of my brain that says I already have one published book whose title begins with With.) Or, y’know, something else.

Anyway, all that rambling is just to give you an idea of the flavor I’m looking for. The actual point of this post is to say that for the next week, I am opening the floor to title suggestions. In between now and noon PST on Monday, e-mail me, leave comments here, or post to Twitter with the hashtag #ANHODgiveaway. I can’t promise I’ll take any of the suggestions as a permanent winner, but I will pick someone as a contest winner, and send them one of these advance copies of A Natural History of Dragons.

If you don’t have any suggestions, don’t worry! I have four ARCs to give away, which means there will be three other opportunities to snag one. In the meanwhile, let the suggesting begin!

BOOKSES BOOKSES BOOKSES MY PRECIOUS

Eeeeee! Much earlier than I expected, a packet of advance reader copies for A Natural History of Dragons has shown up on my doorstep.

. . . wow, y’all. This thing looks tiny next to With Fate Conspire. Which it is; that monstrosity was nearly 157,000 words in the end, and this one is a svelte 93,000. But it’s a little startling.

I should think up a contest to give some of these away, but first I need to spend a little while beaming at them and gloating. ^_^ (I promise only to pet the one I’m keeping for myself, though. Otherwise it might get a little weird.)

Bookses!

Urban Tarot update

I’m very pleased to say that with ten days to go, the Urban Tarot deck is just over a thousand dollars away from being fully funded. Close enough, in fact, that the artist Robert Scott has started making plans for what to do if he overshoots his funding goal.

The full updates (here and here) have more details, but the short form is that if the project goes $3K over the original total, he will add in custom silk spreadcloths for every donor above $65, and if it goes $5K over, then every donor receiving a deck will also get an embroidered velvet bag.

Also, Rob has added a second offer of the “Hermit and the Leviathans” reward package, which is the one where you get a personalized tour of the Fossil Halls at the American Museum of Natural History from one of the deck models, Chris Hall, who is a docent there. Why a second offer? Because the first one got snapped up in record time, and I can understand why. if I didn’t live on the other coast, I’d consider going for that option myself! (As it stands, I went for the option of being a card model instead. No, I’m not telling you which one. You’ll have to wait and see.)

And speaking of things that went fast . . . we’ve added five more to the “Marie Brennan” package, in which you get a signed copy of With Fate Conspire, along with my signature on the guidebook — which, if you recall, will include a short piece of introductory fiction from me. So if that tempts you, head on over to the project page and donate.

Death threats are part of the game we play

Whether you paid any attention to Christopher Priest’s rant about the Clarke shortlist or not, you should go read Cat Valente’s follow-up post, about what would have happened if a woman had said anything even half that scathing.

This is the reality women live with online, and sometimes in person. It isn’t even just a thing that happens when we yell at somebody, when we criticize something, when we get angry. It can happen when we say anything the reader doesn’t like. Express a political opinion? Post pictures of yourself online? Root for the wrong sports team? “Bitch, I hope you get raped to death like the ugly cow you are.”

Because for a frighteningly large segment of the populace, that’s what you say to shut a woman up. It’s a knee-jerk reflex, like swatting a fly.

How large of a segment? Who knows. Any number larger than “pathologically unwell people who are or should be seeing a mental health professional” is too large. And they’re loud. They swarm the internet, they take over the comment sections on various sites, they poison the water and drive out the good, and for whatever reason, we let them get away with it. We don’t band together like we should and say, start acting like a human, instead of something out of Lovecraft.

(I’m laying off the hyenas, out of consideration for my commenters.)

Sometimes we say it. Some of us do. I don’t do it often enough because, to be honest, I stay away from comment threads most of the time. When I see things like the response Jim Hines dissects, my hands go cold, my fingers start shaking, and whether I respond or not I spend the rest of the day chewing that piece of foul-tasting meat over and over and over again; it’s easier just to avoid the trap. But I need to go to bat for human decency more often. We all do. Again and again, until we’ve sent this malignance howling for the shadows.

Have I gotten death threats, rape threats, any of the hatred Cat describes? I haven’t, actually. But the sad thing is, I know that isn’t because I’m a nice person who doesn’t deserve it, a good, demure woman who doesn’t need to be put in her place.

It’s because not enough people are reading what I write. Give me a bigger microphone, and the sewage will come to swamp me, too.

We need to cut this shit out. The men who spew this kind of thing need to get over whatever misogynistic reflex makes them say it, and the rest of us, men and women alike, need to keep telling them so until they do. I don’t know how we do that — I don’t know how we get it through their skulls — but we have to try. Even the attempt is a form of support for the ones drowning in the bile, and they need all the support they can get.

For fuck’s sake, people. That is a person on the other end of the things you say. Remember that. And summon up the basic compassion to care.

In which I get ranty about money and politics

Or rather, in which I link you to other people being ranty. I’ve had some of these sitting around for a dog’s age, and I’m never going to wrangle my thoughts into anything like a coherent enough mass to make an actual post out of it, so instead you get other people being articulate for me.

Must the Rich be Lured into Investing? Who are the Real “Job Creators?” — Supply Side [economic theory] assumes that the rich have a zillion other uses for their cash and thus have to be lured into investing it! Now ponder that nonsense statement. Roll it around and try to imagine it making a scintilla of sense! Try actually asking a very rich person. Once you have a few mansions and their contents and cars and boats and such, actually spending it all holds little attraction. Rather, the next step is using the extra to become even richer.

How Capitalism Kills Companies — There’s no limit at all to the amount of growth that the public companies will demand: in 2007, for instance, after a year when Citigroup made an astonishing $21.5 billion in net income, Fortune was complaining about its “less-than-stellar earnings”, and saying — quite accurately — that if they didn’t improve, the CEO would soon be out of a job. We now know, of course, that most if not all of those earnings were illusory, a product of the housing bubble which was shortly to burst and bring the bank to the brink of insolvency. But even bubblicious illusory earnings aren’t good enough for the stock market.

Central Tendency in Skewed Distributions: A Lesson in Social Justice — The point being, the lesson of the positive skew, is that the distance between being middle class and being poor is very, very small.

Radical Solutions to Economic Inequality — There is something almost quaint — but decidedly refreshing — about the commissioners’ blunt language. “Effective action by Congress is required…,” the report proclaimed, “to check the growth of an hereditary aristocracy, which is foreign to every conception of American Government and menacing to the welfare of the people and the existence of the Nation as a democracy.” Far from debating whether “corporations are people,” the commission took for granted that concentrations of corporate power were undemocratic, that gigantic fortunes “constitute a menace to the State,” and that it was the duty of government to restore a balance of power.

Jubilee. Jubilee. Jubilee. — Reduce the principle, forgive a portion of the debt, proclaim a jubilee. It would save taxpayers money. It would keep hundreds of thousands of families in their homes.

But it can’t happen if we decide to act like jerks.

Person, Person, Corporate Asset.

And one I missed including in the race-related link dump, that you absolutely should read if you have not already: Teju Cole on The White Savior Industrial Complex.

A folktale for Legend of the Five Rings

We had another session of our L5R game on Sunday, which astute readers will recall was April Fool’s Day.

The Togashi monks — of which my character is one — are renowed for doing kind of weird and/or inexplicable things. Clearly I needed to play a few April Fool’s jokes in character, right? Unfortunately, I’m not much of a prankster, and by the time I thought up this idea, I was already at FOGcon (meaning my brain was well on its way toward being fried). The only trick I managed to come up with in the end was to give the Ikoma libraries a text they did not have, namely the Book of the Cricket: the world’s tiniest scroll, detailing the many calamities that should have killed my lucky cricket but haven’t. (And I do mean tiny. I had to use a magic tattoo to be able to see well enough to write it, and the Ikoma had to use a pair of spells to copy the scroll and then enlarge the copy before they could read the damn thing.)

But because my brain can apparently do folklore in its sleep, I did come up with a story for why there is a tradition in Dragon lands of playing tricks on the last day of the month of the Dragon. For any interested parties, I give you the tale of Chibuta and the passing of winter.

In the earliest days of the Empire . . . .

Books read, March 2012

This post tells you a great deal about what my March was like.

Akata Witch, Nnedi Okorafor. The elevator pitch for this one might be “Harry Potter in Nigeria.” Sunny, a girl with albinism, finds out she’s one of the “Leopard People,” which is to say people with magic, and learns how to use her power, so as to defeat an evil magician. I loved it for the setting and the differences that produced (Sunny’s schooling isn’t half so formal as Harry’s, and the whole approach to that, not to mention the magic itself, is not much like Rowling’s work), but the general shape of the story is familiar, and didn’t engage me as much as a more unusual structure might have. Especially because there’s a vibe common to this sort of urban fantasy, a “magic people are cooler than normal people” vibe, that rubs me the wrong way, and while there’s hints in here that said attitude is not an admirable thing in Leopard People, the story itself doesn’t do as much as I would have liked to deconstruct the arrogance and separatism. (Possibly later books will do more? I think this is the first in a series. Certainly the underlayer to the evil-magician thing suggests more to come.)

The Time of the Ghost, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Range of Ghosts, Elizabeth Bear. Discussed elsewhere.

The Skiver’s Guide, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Changeover, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

Earwig and the Witch, Diana Wynne Jones. Discussed elsewhere.

. . . yeah. If it weren’t for my determination to finish the DWJ Project this month, that list would be even shorter. February’s prediction came true with a vengeance.

I hope to do better in April, but as mentioned before, I’m getting into research reading now, and that doesn’t go as fast.

A Natural History of Dragons is off

To my editor, that is, and thence to the copy-editor.

While I wait for the CEM to be dropped on me, I get to poke at short stories, and start noodling around with the second book of the series. I need to get its title nailed down . . . .

off to FOGcon

I will not be checking LJ, for the most part, and my apologies to everyone I owe an e-mail. I’ll be back on Monday.

If you’re coming to FOGcon, I hope to see you there! My more-or-less accurate schedule (I think it has a few details wrong) is here.

The Urban Tarot — now with bonus content!

I mentioned before that a friend of mine is doing a Kickstarter project to raise the funds needed to complete his Urban Tarot Deck, right?

Well, I got to chatting with him. And after a bit of behind-the-scenes scheming, I have a bit of news for you all.

If the project gets funded, the guidebook for the deck will include a short piece of introductory fiction, written by yours truly.

But wait — there’s more!

There is also a new reward level: the Marie Brennan Package. One first-edition numbered deck, the tarot guidebook signed by both me and Robert Scott (the artist), AND — specific to this package only — a signed hardcover copy of With Fate Conspire. (This is, after all, an urban tarot deck, and that is decidedly the most urban of my novels.)

I’m really stoked to be a part of this project. As I said before, I’ve been hoping for years to see this finished; well, as of me posting this, Rob is halfway to his goal, and there are still three weeks to go. If you already have With Fate Conspire, check out the other reward packages; you can get the guidebook (and therefore the fiction) at practically any level of backing, or splurge and enjoy the talents of one of the deck models. Alas, Chris Hall’s guided tour of the American Museum of Natural History has already been claimed, but I can personally vouch for the awesomeness of Jessica Hammer’s knowledge of game design, and the deliciousness of the food at Tse Wei Lim’s restaurant. (In fact, if you live in the Boston area, you should go to Journeyman at some point regardless.)

Head on over and take a look. And if you’ll be at FOGcon this weekend, I’ll be bringing some flyers with me, to spread the word far and wide.

Wilful Impropriety cover

I keep being totally inconsistent as to whether I use the American spelling of the title (as seen below) or the UK spelling. But anyway! Remember that anthology I sold “False Colours” to?

I’m told the cover for the UK version will be the same, bar spelling. Anyway, this is due out in September, it sounds like. I am very much looking forward to my copy!

Elizabeth Bear’s RANGE OF GHOSTS

On a more cheerful note: today is the release date for Range of Ghosts, by Elizabeth Bear (matociquala).

She had me at “Central Asian epic fantasy.” I have been eagerly awaiting this book since I first saw her mentioning it on LJ, oh, more than a year ago — maybe two. THERE IS A SHORTAGE OF MONGOLIAN FANTASY IN THE WORLD, Y’ALL. Fortunately, this is the first book in a series, and so that means the lack is being addressed, at least in small part.

The most succinct thing I can say about this book is that it’s rich, to a degree I haven’t seen in . . . ever? Rich in culture, rich in fantasy, rich in politics. I don’t know enough about the Mongols to tell where Bear diverges from their real society into her own invention, but her Qersnyk tribesmen are not Standard Fantasy Nomads, and the care and detail devoted to the horses in the story is both beautiful and necessary. Without that, I wouldn’t believe in the culture. The political complexity laid out in this first book bears no resemblance to the “good guys vs. black-armored masses” dichotomy of older epic fantasy, and promises to bear interesting fruit as the story goes along. And then there are the touches that are just pure wonder: the sky above your head depends on who controls the territory you’re in, and in Qersnyk lands, there is a moon in the sky for each member of the ruling family. Temur, the Qersnyk protagonist, looks up each night to see which of his cousins are still alive.

This is very much the first book in a series. The necessity of setting things up means the story is less plotty than I was expecting; Bear can’t just wave vaguely in the direction of the usual epic fantasy tropes, but has to spend time developing her world and the societies Temur and Samarkar (a female wizard from Tsarepheth, and the other main protagonist) come from. There’s a lot of foundation-laying going on, and the climax of this book doesn’t particularly wrap anything up, even in the short term. (There is no blowing up of the Death Star 1.0 here.) But the richness is pretty entrancing all on its own, and I’m very eager to see what grows out of it in the later books.

(And I want to see more of Bansh. Because Temur’s horse is the best horse ever.)

As I said, this is the release date — yeah, I got an advance review copy; envy me! — so hie thee to a bookstore and see if they have it in. Between the familiarly Europeanish tone of most epic fantasy and the real-world setting of urban fantasy, the difference of Bear’s world is like a breath of fresh (and magical) air.

Staring it in the eye

Every time I try to start drafting a post about Trayvon Martin, I run up against the impossible reach of the issue.

There’s enough to say about the kid to fill an entire post, about the injustice of what happened to him. But I can’t tease those things out from all the other things: Zimmerman and his history of neighborhood vigilantism; Geraldo Rivera and the bullshit about hoodies; the appalling failure to investigate this crime as it should have been, when it should have been; the Sanford Police Department and their previous failures to deal appropriately with this kind of thing; the Stand Your Ground law in Florida and elsewhere (which I had not heard of before, and which makes my blood run cold); all the way out to parenting black children in this country, or ALEC and its influence on the legislative agenda of many states. It’s some kind of monster out of Lovecraft, with tentacles reaching everywhere — and I don’t mean that metaphor in a trivializing fashion. I look at this, and feel my sanity die a little. Along with my hope for humanity.

It’s too much to take in, let alone talk about coherently.

Especially when my thoughts sweep outward to take in Shaima Alawadi, or the people whose names no one asks about. And skimming through my browser window to find where those tabs had got to, I passed a bunch I’m keeping for a later post, about capitalism and economic inequality and I’m fooling myself if I pretend these things don’t tie together down at the root.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist was talking the other day about how depressing The Wire is, not despite of but because of its brilliance: it shows you how deeply ingrained these issues are in the institutions that make up our society, and how near to impossible change is. I haven’t watched more than maybe half a dozen episodes of the show because I can’t deal with looking that sort of thing in the eye; I need to stay away in order to preserve my belief that we can improve things. But the problem isn’t in the TV show — it’s in the real world. And sometimes you can’t avoid staring it in the eye.

The Sanford Police Department will likely face some consequences. Maybe we’ll get the Stand Your Ground laws struck down in a few places. But hacking out those roots and digging the whole mess out of the soil of our country . . . I don’t know how you do that. Days like this one, I wonder if you can.

The DWJ Project: Earwig and the Witch

With this, we reach the end.

Earwig and the Witch is an illustrated children’s book (aimed at ages 8-12) published this year, though it was prepared before Jones passed away. It tells the story of a girl called Earwig, who lives quite happily at an orphanage, where she’s able to make everyone do what she wants. But then a very peculiar couple comes along and adopts her, and for the first time in her life, Earwig finds herself facing a challenge.

It’s a short book, of course, and (perhaps because of Paul O. Zelinsky’s illustrations) has a distinctly Roald Dahl vibe about it. If I find myself wanting more — more about Earwig’s friend Custard, and more about the circumstances that led to her being left on the orphanage doorstep, years ago — that’s par for the course, rather than any particular flaw in the story itself.

***

And of course, I do want more. I saved reading this book until today, and knew that sitting down with it would make me sad, because it’s the last one. There’s a collection of Jones’ essays underway, and I’m looking forward to that; there may be unpublished manuscripts or half-finished books that will yet find their way out into the world. If any such things appear, I’ll read them, because I want to soak up any last drop that I can. But in essence, there will be no more fiction from Diana Wynne Jones.

She was, as I said before, the reason I became a writer. Her books have been with me for more than two-thirds of my life. I don’t love all of them; this re-read has uncovered a number that don’t click with me for some reason, and a few that aren’t very good at all. But her body of work is amazing.

Requiescas in pace, Diana Wynne Jones. And thank you.

The DWJ Project: Changeover

Today is the anniversary of Diana Wynne Jones’ death. In memory of that, I bring you the final two posts of my re-read, which — through design on my part — will cover her first and last published novels.

This, of course, is the first one. It isn’t fantasy (or science fiction), and it was written for adults; as such, it definitely feels different from the bulk of her work. (There are not usually any strip-teases in her books.) And yet — as you would expect — there are touches that come across as familiar, a voice that will show up again and again in later stories.

The plot is (deliberately) farcical. The British government is preparing to hand over the reins of their soon-to-be-former colony, a fictional African country called Nmkwami. One of the governor’s aides, reading out his notes about suggestions to “mark change-over” (that is, to commemorate the handover of power), is misheard; the governor thinks he’s said something about a man named Mark Changeover. The “who’s on first” conversation that ensues leaves the governor with the distinct impression that some kind of rabble-rouser or terrorist is on the loose in Nmkwami. And, because nobody in the bureaucracy wants to admit they haven’t heard anything about such an important problem, the confusion snowballs, until all of Nmwkami, British and local alike, is turned out to hunt the Anarchist-Communist-Imperialist revolutionary Mark Changeover.

I’ll go ahead and put the rest behind a cut, though given how difficult it is to find this book, you guys may or may not care about spoilers. (Many thanks to katfeete for loaning me her copy, thus saving me about ninety dollars buying a used copy online.)

(more…)

The DWJ Project: “A Slice of Life” (poem)

Endless thanks to carbonel, who saved me from my own obsessive-compulsiveness and sent me the text of this poem in time for the grand finale of this project tomorrow.

. . . of course, there isn’t a lot to say about it. “A Slice of Life” is a forty-line poem (forty-five if you count the days) from the viewpoint of a schoolchild who’s convinced the headmaster has been killed and is being served up piecemeal for lunch throughout the week. It made me think of Shel Silverstein, and also of “Sideways Stories from Wayside School” — does anybody else remember that series?

(Edited to add: I googled to find out why I had the name “Solomon Grundy” in my head — the headmaster is Mr. Grundy — and discovered the poem was clearly inspired by this nursery rhyme.)

It was published in the poetry anthology Now We Are Sick, edited by Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones. I look forward to seeing what else is in there, once my copy arrives.

The DWJ Project: scattered short stories and The Skiver’s Guide

I noticed, when I made my post for Unexpected Magic, that there were (as near as I could tell) three short stories not collected elsewhere, plus a nonfiction humour book, and one poem. (Info taken from here.) That last will, dammit, not be arriving at my house in time to meet my self-imposed deadline of tomorrow — which is the anniversary of her death — but I’ve managed to get all the others.

(Confidential to the Internet: if you have a copy of Now We Are Sick, and the poem is short enough for you to type it up and send it to me, please do. Just so I can finish everything in time.)

The first short story, “Mela Worms,” made me nervous. It’s contained in Arrows of Eros, which is an anthology of erotic science fiction. When you have been reading a certain author since you were nine, and that author writes almost exclusively for children and young adults, it is kind of brain-breaking to contemplate her writing anything in that vein. Fortunately for my sanity, her story is much more on the “speculative” side rather than the “erotic” one, as the titular mela worms, which are necessary for the reproduction of an alien species, get loose on an overcrowded spaceship and wreak havoc. It isn’t the most memorable story of hers ever, but it’s also far from the worst.

The second (and I’m putting these in the order I read them) was “Samantha’s Diary,” in Stories: All New Tales (which may hold the record for most utterly bland anthology title ever). This one is definitely on the weak side; it’s near-future science fiction in which somebody begins sending the narrator Samantha gifts, which the reader will quickly figure out are the gifts named in the song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Too much of the story, alas, is spent on Samantha being surprised by the day’s deliveries, and trying to figure out where to put all the birds. It eventually diverges from that path, and gets better when it does, but on the whole, this one is skippable. (Unless you’re being ridiculously completist. Not that we know anybody like that.)

The third story, “I’ll Give You My Word,” is probably the best of the lot. It takes place in a version of this world where magic is common, and concerns a pair of children, the younger of whom mostly speaks in nonsensical combinations of SAT-type words. Exactly how his ability ties in with a certain magical threat isn’t as well-established as I’d like, but it’s a very DWJ-ish story, and reasonably fun.

Finally, The Skiver’s Guide is a humorous how-to book on the topic of skiving (or “slacking off,” if you’re not familiar with that word). It wasn’t as funny as I’d been hoping, but that’s largely because it’s a very good anatomy of a personality type I kind of want to punch in the face. So, y’know, props to it for that.

Two more books and posts to go — but if you can get me the poem in time, please do . . . .

two pieces of anthology news

Clockwork Phoenix 2! Is now available as an e-book (like the first one a while ago). You can buy it from Weightless Books, or from Amazon US or UK. (More information here.)

For those who may not recall, this one has my short story “Once a Goddess.”

***

InterGalactic Awards Anthology Vol. I! Will be FREE this weekend on Amazon, from Saturday through Monday. Apart from some seriously awesome people like Peter Beagle and Aliette de Bodard (aliettedb), it also includes stories from me and a personal friend, Von Carr. Mine is “A Heretic by Degrees” (which is a Driftwood story), and hers has the fabulous title of “Sister Jasmine Brings the Pain” — the best post-apocalypses story about a combat nun I’ve ever read. ^_^

It can be yours this weekend!

Writing Fight Scenes: Beats

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

One thing you may not know, if all your experience of fights comes from reading books and watching movies: they are short.

The SCA fencing practice I used to attend would sometimes stage melees, where everybody would get divided up into groups and set against each other en masse. One time they arranged two tables with a gap in between, and declared the gap to be a doorway, that one group (consisting of about five people) was defending. The goal of the other group (equal in numbers) was to get past them to the back wall.

From start to finish, how long do you think it took?

Less than twenty seconds.

(And that’s counting the time the attackers spent advancing, before they closed with their opponents.)

Fighting is kind of like being a soccer/football goalie guarding against a penalty kick. Do you leap left or right? There are physical clues that will tell you which way to go, but you have only a fraction of a second in which to spot and analyze them, before you have to choose. Left or right? If you’re good, your odds of choosing correctly are better than 50% . . . but sooner or later, they’ll slip one past you.

Sooner or later, a decisive blow will get past somebody’s defense. And it’s probably going to be sooner.

There are times when you want to replicate this in your story. Near the beginning of The Bourne Identity (film, not book), Jason Bourne takes down a pair of cops in less time than it took me to type this sentence. Because the usual convention of fiction is that combat lasts a long time, the effect of a quick takedown is to say, this guy is really badass. Mind you, in prose, the duration of the actual moment and the length of its description aren’t correlated much at all; you could gloss over a knock-down drag-out match in half a sentence, or spend a whole paragraph detailing the three lightning-fast moves that lay the opponent out. But if you want badass points, make it short. (There’s a non-combat-related bit in The Ringed Castle, one of the later books in Dorothy Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, where she spends maybe two or three sentences telling us that what with one thing and another, a handful of characters got themselves from England to Russia. Her not telling us how they managed that — in the sixteenth century, when that journey was not what you’d call easy — makes them seem 300% more awesome than if she’d spent a chapter on it.)

But it’s a convention of fiction that important, set-piece fights can last a really long time. Fair enough; our purpose is to be dramatic, not realistic. So how do you make a fight scene long, without boring the reader?

The answer lies within!