Once upon a time in the West . . . .

I mentioned early this year that I was running a Scion game set on the American frontier. Well, it recently occurred to me that the players have gotten far enough into the story, and uncovered enough of the metaplot, that I can now divulge publicly what the game’s about.

To follow this, you need to know three things:

1) Scion is a game about playing the half-mortal children of gods in the modern world, starting out as “heroes” and ascending in power and fame to become demigods and (if you survive) eventually gods in their own right.

2) The underlying enemies in this scenario are the Titans, the parents of the gods themselves. They’re truly impersonal, elemental powers: the “body” of the Greater Titan of Fire, for example, is more or less equivalent to the D&D Elemental Plane of Fire. However, Greater Titans can manifest more concretely as avatars, which are god-like beings reflecting a particular aspect of their concept. Prometheus, for example, is an avatar of the Greater Titan of Fire; so is Kagu-tsuchi, but they embody different things. The Titans aren’t precisely evil, but they’re not friendly to the world, and their influence usually isn’t a good thing.

3) One of the Scion books included material for how you could do a WWII-era game. In this, they proposed that Columbia (of the U.S.), Britannia (of the U.K.), and Marianne (of France) were all sisters, daughters of Athena sent out as an experiment in governance. It also proposed a Yankee pantheon, made up largely of tall-tale figures (Paul Bunyan, John Henry, etc), headed by Columbia and Uncle Sam.

So here’s what I did with those three things . . . .

U.S. history, as seen through a mythological lens.

Words: On Sayin’ It Rong

There’s a conversation I have occasionally with fellow reader-geeks, about the words you know perfectly well from books, but almost never hear in conversation. The words you think you know how to say . . . until one day you’re forty-one and find out that all this time, you’ve been doing it wrong.

My personal go-to example for this is “chasm.” I was in my twenties before I discovered that ch is not pronounced as in “chair,” but rather as in “chord.” How was I supposed to know? It’s not as if that word gets used in everyday speech. “Debacle” is another one; like many people, I spent a long time putting the accent on the first syllable (DEB-ack-el) rather than the second (deh-BAH-kel). My sixth-grade teacher nearly cracked up when, during the health unit, I asked a question about kah-PILL-aries, rather than KAH-pill-aries — capillaries.* I don’t think I was ever in the pronounce-the-b camp for “subtle,” but I know a lot of people who were.

I correct myself when I can, of course — but the problem isn’t doing the correction; it’s knowing that you need to in the first place. To learn that you’re pronouncing something wrong, you generally have to hear the correct pronunciation in use, but of course we have these problems to begin with because the words so rarely get spoken. (Plus, when you hear it, you shouldn’t assume the other guy has it wrong; you have to second-guess yourself, and figure out who’s right. Sometimes it will be you. Sometimes it won’t.) You can’t just ask, “what words am I pronouncing wrong?” You don’t know. And unless a friend of yours keeps a list of words they’ve heard you mangle, nobody else is likely to have the answer ready.

But the tough ones are often widely shared, and so I throw the doors open to the internet and ask:

What words did you pronounce wrong for a long time? How were you saying them, and when did you find out your mistake?

Because it’s entirely possible that if you post a comment to the effect of, “oh yeah, I said vuh-HEM-ment for ages, until my wife pointed out it’s VEE-a-ment,” somebody else will read this and think, wait, THAT’S how you pronounce “vehement”? So I am furthermore declaring this a Shame-Free Zone; nobody should feel embarrassed for admitting past or present errors. It’s a common failing of readers, that we have big vocabularies we maybe don’t use right in speech. Whenever I have this conversation in person, people bond over it — knowing they aren’t the only ones to have made those mistakes. Share your stories, admit your blunders, and maybe you can save somebody else from the same fate.

*Though I’m checking all of these in the OED as I list them, and now I discover that accenting the second syllable is a valid alternative, though not the preferred one.

Heh.

Last night — fairly late, West Coast time — I noticed that Wikipedia’s article of the day was on the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.

Later that same night, I noticed the OED’s word of the day was “gunpowder.”

Huh, I thought, that’s a funny coincide — oh.

Yeah, you’d think (having written a Gunpowder Plot story and all), I would remember Guy Fawkes Day. I can’t even blame it on me being in California, and therefore it still being November 4th when those things showed up; it still hasn’t registered on me that oh yeah, it’s November already.

Jeebus — where did 2010 go?

Anyway, it’s apparently also Diwali, so I hope my friends in many parts of the world are having fun lighting things on fire and making them go boom. (So long as none of those things are, say, the Houses of Parliament.)

medical/law enforcement questions

Do psychiatric facilities generally fingerprint their patients?

If cops were to get hold of bloodstained clothing, how long would it take to run an analysis on the blood? And what information would that give? How about analyzing non-visible blood residue on a knife?

(I’m trying to clear some written-but-not-revised stories out of here.)

Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. (Or in my case, sweep the floor.)

There is a story.

It started out as a fanficcy little speculation on somebody else’s world, and at that stage it lived only in my head. One day the seed attached itself instead to another idea, this one mine, and having done so, it grew.

I tried many times to write it as a short story. Seven times, according to my files, and of those, only attempt #5 was ever completed. But I knew it sucked, and that’s why attempts #6 and #7 happened — continual attempts to cram the narrative into the confines of a short story. Until one day I said, screw this; let’s see how long it wants to be. Whereupon I wrote a twenty-two thousand word novella.

That being a useless length for a young writer with no publishing credits, the novella went into the drawer. Later I brought it out for critique, thinking I might try to sell it after all, but I never got around to revising it. My odds of selling it were too low, and I had this subconscious feeling the story needed more than just a polish. So back into the drawer it went.

Until I found myself with a reason to pick it up again, and a chance of maybe selling it, too. More than seven years after writing the novella, I brought it out for critique again, this time with the knowledge that I would probably do a ground-up rewrite: after all, one hopes I had improved in the intervening years. I knew I wanted to make substantial changes, but what I didn’t know — not consciously, not until one of my readers pointed it out — was that the story had a fundamental flaw at its core. One that made most of the narrative action pointless and unnecessary. The kind of flaw you have to fix, or dump the story.

Tonight, while sweeping the dojo after karate, I figured out how to fix that flaw. And given the story, that was a very appropriate time for such an epiphany.

No, you don’t get to know what the story is. Not yet. But I promise you’ll know within the next six months, whatever the tale’s ultimate fate will be.

Oof.

Got home last night from my family reunion the World Fantasy Convention, which was its usual splendid self. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s gotten better over time: a lot of people are con regulars, which means that it’s easy to build up a community of people you know and look forward to seeing each year. Also, I’ve gotten less stressed about being there; I used to worry about the moments where I seemed out of gear, not able to engage with people the way I wanted to, Squandering my Valuable Time There — but these days I just chill out, and lo, the issue resolves itself. Trusting that makes the whole thing a lot easier.

This one was especially good because it featured a lot of meeting up with people I know online, but have never really hung out with in person. time-shark, saladinahmed — heck, I even met jimhines for realz! Not to mention many other wonderful folks I didn’t know well at all, but had great conversations with nonetheless. Also, the location meant a bunch of my B-ton friends were able to come, whether from Indiana or the places they’ve scattered to since, and seeing them was especially nice.

And now my voice sounds like somebody raked it over a cheese-grater, because that’s what WFC is to me: the place I go to talk all weekend long, often over the roar of several hundred other people doing the same thing. Then I come home exhausted and halfway to mute and happy.

It’s my family reunion. Complete with hugs and drunkenness and the occasional bits of Personal Drama, and then we all scatter to the four winds until next year. Which in this case will be San Diego; I’m thinking of driving down. It would be a ten-hour drive by the coastal route, but if I can get a co-driver it might be worth it. Heck, I might even take an extra day, stop for the night somewhere along Highway 1, make a bit of a vacation out of it. We’ll see.

Spending October at home is for the birds!

Tonight I leave on my third trip of the month, this one to World Fantasy. The weird thing is, it’s the first time this month I’ll be flying on my own dime; the first trip was my GoH gig at Sirens, and the second . . . last weekend, my publisher sent me here:

About a stone’s throw from the Kodak Theatre, no less. But it isn’t nearly as exciting as you think.

I was not there to meet with a high-powered Hollywood producer about how they want to pay me lots of money to film one of my books. I was there, instead, for the Southern California Independent Booksellers’ Association annual meeting. This is an industry event that brings writers in to schmooze over dinner with staff from local independent bookstores. I’d never done one before, so it was interesting; the authors got fed beforehand, so we wouldn’t have to choose between talking and eating (or end up talking with our mouths full), and then during everybody else’s meal we got shuttled from table to table, chatting up the people there.

Serendipity was my friend at this event. Not on the travel side — two-hour flight delay on the way there, three-hour on the way back, for a flight that’s a little more than an hour long — but with the new friends I made. I got to the hotel just in time to fling myself into nicer clothing and run downstairs, whereupon I got my registration and stood trying to catch my breath, wondering if I would have anything other than the basics in common with the other writers there. (They come from all corners of publishing, nonfiction as well as fiction, children’s picture books to adult.) But lo, I was not standing a full minute before I heard the phrase “historical fiction” come from two women nearby.

I drifted closer.

Then I heard Newton’s name.

I drifted closer still.

Ended up with two new friends. One was a writer of historical fiction, Laurel Corona, who’s bopped all around the timeline even more than I have; her most recent book, Penelope’s Daughter, is set in Homeric Greece, and her next involves an eighteenth-century mathematician, Émilie du Châtelet. The other, Deborah Harkness, is (if memory serves) a professor of history whose debut novel A Discovery of Witches will be coming out soon; it’s about a researcher at the Bodleian Library who comes across an alchemical manuscript that gets her into all sorts of trouble. Oh, and Deborah’s a giant Tudor geek, too.

Nah, we didn’t have anything to talk about.

Best part was, Deborah was at my third table, and so were two women currently reading her novel and loving it. And the table host was a big SF/F fan. So I spent the dessert course geeking about alchemy and how Newton was a complete jackass. Friends, this is what we call success.

Anyway, that was my Hollywood adventure. Now I go off to the much colder environs of Columbus, Ohio. Send me warm thoughts . . . .

I suppose I should post a World Fantasy schedule.

I’m going to be a busy little swan this WFC. I’ve only got one official event:

The West Doesn’t Exist, 4 p.m. Thursday
For all the world is round and most educated people in antiquity knew this — Why is it that in so many fantasies, there are places on the map that you just can not go?

But I’m also part of a thirty-author group event at the OSU campus bookstore from 11-1 on Saturday, signing and doing a giveaway. Furthermore, akashiver is reading, and therinth is reading, and jimhines is reading, and and there’s a giant mass Black Gate reading Saturday night, and I’m supposed to have dinner with my editor in there somewhere, and gahhhhh I can already tell I’m going to be running all weekend. (For values of “running” that translate to “sitting or standing around having fabulous conversations and then realizing I need to be somewhere else and crap how did I get through the whole weekend without ever finding the time to hang out with <insert various awesome people here>?”

So yeah: look for the braid, come up and say hi. Especially if you’re somebody I don’t see very often. (Or have never actually met in person — jimhines, I’m looking at you.)

five things I want

1) I want to write a secondary-world fantasy, where I can Make Shit Up rather than having to bend myself around reality.

2) I want to write short stories again.

3) I want to move forward on some piece of the logjam of ideas building up in my mind.

4) I want to know what I’m doing next.

5) I really, really want to be done with this revision, so I can get on with my life.

the slow creep upward

Just noticed that as of last night’s revision, With Fate Conspire is officially the longest Onyx Court novel. (144K and counting.)

I’m hoping the damn thing doesn’t hit 150K before I’m done, but given the big honking change I’m thinking of putting in, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.

China Mieville is not your Facebook friend

When we say “identity theft,” we usually mean something having to do with credit cards and the like. But at least when that happens, you can notify the various powers that be, and they’ll do something about it.

Not so with Facebook. China Miéville has notified them several times of at least one person (possibly more) impersonating him on Facebook, and so far has gotten jack in the way of reply. Are his life savings being wiped out by this? No, of course not. But if you think this couldn’t hurt him, think again. As a writer, he’s a public figure, albeit a minor one; his ability to work depends partly upon his reputation. If the impersonator wanted to, they could tarnish that reputation, by sending messages or joining groups or otherwise doing things that would reflect badly on him. Even if they don’t, they are in a fashion acting in his name, without his permission. Which is not something anybody should be allowed to do.

But Facebook doesn’t care. As Deanna reports, their old system was that you had to be a Facebook user in the first place to complain about somebody impersonating you on the service; at least they’ve made the small step of changing that. But in general, their policy is still abysmal. No system of verification; no grievance process worth the name. Your ex could create a profile, pretend to be you, “like” a bunch of groups that make you look like a terrible person, and then when you apply for a job your prospective employer finds that profile and decides they don’t want to hire somebody who’s a fan of “Immigrants Go Home.” And there won’t be a damn thing you can do about it.

How obvious does Facebook have to make it that they don’t give a shit about anybody — their users included — before people will stop using the service?

I canceled my account a while ago, when they went one round too many of “we’re going to share info you thought was private! And you have to jump through hoops to stop us!” I tried not to proselytize too much back then, because I don’t want to piss off people who are content to keep their Facebook accounts, but Jesus H. The flash games just aren’t worth it, especially when the company is mining data about you and selling it to advertisers. As for getting in touch with old friends . . . there are other ways to be findable online. Seeing random updates about how somebody I haven’t seen since graduation didn’t get enough sleep last night is, again, not worth it to me. There are other ways to get in touch if you want to have a real conversation, and the more I see of Facebook’s evil, the harder time I have understanding why anybody else should play along.

new chemistry question for your noses

How about sulfates? Do they tend to smell of sulfur, or not?

(This is what I get for deciding to put faerie science in my books. I have to figure out how the real science goes, then figure out how the fantasy version goes, then figure out how to describe the fantasy version, based on but maybe not identical to how I’d describe the real version. If I ever do this to myself again, somebody please kick me.)

Hey, chemists!

How would you describe the smell of acid? Does it have a smell? (Any kind of acid will do; I’m looking for commonalities here.)

I cannot say much about bullying.

My friends-list is full of posts about bullying, or more precisely the experience of being bullied, because I am friends with a lot of geeks and nerds and other such target types. They’re heart-wrenching to read, but not because they call up echoes of my own past. You see, I was never bullied. And to all the adults who tell the victims “It’s your fault, you must have done something to provoke them,” I have this to say:

The sole reason I didn’t get bullied is that I was lucky.

It’s the only explanation I can find. I was freakishly skinny — seriously, I look at pictures of myself and wonder how I didn’t snap in half — I wore thick glasses all the way through elementary school, I was an unabashed smart kid and book nerd. I was in the band. I had a weird name. There was an abudance of reasons to pick on me . . . but to the best of my recollection, nobody really did.

See, I went to school in the kind of affluent area where parents generally drove their kids to school (as mine did), so I never experienced the rolling hyena cage that is the school bus. During my early years, the only time I rode one of those was when a group of us were bussed to the once-a-week gifted program, held in another school — a program that was large enough, and included enough like-minded kids, that I had plenty of friends. We had honors and AP classes as I got to junior high and high school, so that I never even saw a whole subset of the student body, the subset that might have thought being smart was something to mock you for. The band in my high school was roughly 150 students out of 1500 — ten percent, and a large enough block that we could (and did) just socialize with each other, filling up entire lunch tables, going to practice after school, storing our things in the extra lockers we got by the band hall. Hell, our head drum major was voted homecoming king one year, because the drill team thought he was the cutest thing ever, and that plus the band was enough to lift him above the various football players who were his competitors. Our solidarity protected us.

Not a single piece of that was my own doing. I didn’t conform, didn’t scare the bullies off, didn’t do any of the things adults might advise to prevent the crimes of others. I was lucky.

But even luck may not save you. One of my classmates — a guy I’d known since elementary school, who’d gone through the same system I had, who was in the band — committed suicide during high school. I don’t know if he was bullied, but I know the football team talked some appallingly ugly shit about him afterward. He left behind a community, though; the entire band was devastated, and a posse very nearly went after the football players who were saying those things. That’s a lot more than most bullied kids have. But he didn’t have it because he did anything, other than being himself; he had it because the circumstances made it possible.

The kids who get picked on do not have power over their situations. Telling them it’s their responsibility to make change happen isn’t just unfair, it’s adding to the problem. It’s like grabbing the kid’s hand and smacking him with it while saying, “stop hitting yourself.” We need to not blame the victims. We need authority to step in, the same way we ask authority to step in when adults get stalked or assaulted or harassed. And for the love of god, we need to remember that our instincts are animal ones, and that altruism and compassion and so on don’t happen because a fairy waves a wand, they’re things that need to be fostered — that children need to be taught how not to act like beasts. We need to improve our math scores and everything else, too, at least here in the U.S., but I think I’d happily trade that for a school system that raises kids to be human beings, rather than hyenas.

I don’t know how to do that. But I know it needs to happen, because not everybody is lucky, and even luck can’t save everyone.

Revisiting the Wheel of Time: The Fires of Heaven

I’ve picked up quite a few new blog readers since the last post in this series, so to recap: I’m going back through the Wheel of Time, partly as a reader (so I can read the ending and know what the heck is going on), but partly as a writer, to look at it with a professional eye and see what works and what doesn’t. This has particularly meant looking at the structure, to see what really happened to the narrative pacing as the books went along, but there are some content-level bits of analysis going on as well. I stopped reading after Crossroads of Twilight, so please, no spoilers for Knife of Dreams or The Gathering Storm. If you’d like to see and/or comment on previous posts, just follow the Wheel of Time tag.

So, The Fires of Heaven. In which we begin our journey into the swamp.

By that I mean, this is the book where I see the pacing consequences of Jordan’s decisions in TDR and TSR coming home to roost. Once TFoH gets going, I enjoy it just fine . . . but it takes a while to get going. We’re skirting the fringes of the swamp, bogging down occasionally, and if memory serves that problem will get worse before it gets better.

Let’s step in a bit closer than usual, to show what I mean by this.

In which we consider the effects of point of view.

Why is Faerie ruled by Queens?

By popular request, my keynote from Sirens. The actual speech I delivered was a little different — for one thing, this version doesn’t have the comments about Helen Mirren as Prospera in Julie Taymor’s upcoming film of The Tempest — but the gist of it followed this pretty closely. I’m debating whether to post it to my website as-is, or update it based on the comments and feedback I got at the con; thoughts?

Why is Faerie ruled by Queens?

Sirens recap

I have a lot to say about Sirens. Con reports aren’t something I usually do in detail, but this was my first experience with the con, my first con of that particular sort, and my first time being a Guest of Honor; unsurprisingly, this produces Thoughts. I’ll put them behind the cut, but for those who don’t want to read the whole shebang, here’s the short form:

It was amazing.

If your idea of a good con is one where you can spend pretty much your whole weekend in really good conversations about books, or hang out without feeling there’s a divide between the Authors and the Attendees, or get actual face time with the Guests of Honor, you should take a look at Sirens. I’m going to try to go back next year if I can, which should tell you something right there.

Also, Vail is pretty stunning in early October.

For more detail, follow me behind the cuts.

Wednesday . . . .