For those interested in the interrelation of music and books, today’s countdown-to-book-release goodie for A Star Shall Fall is the soundtrack.
Usual caveat: if you stare at those new track titles long enough, you may be able to guess some of what’s going to happen in the plot (though I do make an effort to avoid outright spoilers).
You should be able to hear samples from some of the tracks in the iTunes store. Enjoy!
Finished another Driftwood story. Wrote most of this one on the Bahamas cruise, because it wasn’t really work work, it was fun work. (Especially since the goal of this one is to have a Driftwood story that isn’t depressing.)
Current title is “Stone and Sky,” but I hope to find something more interesting before it gets sent out to magazines. It needs to sit for a bit and get critiqued first, though, so the title fairy has some time to show up.
(Right now, my subconscious wants to call it “Two Madmen in a Basket.” It is possibly a silly enough story to make that work.)
I haven’t run a lot of games. (In fact, I’ve run precisely two: Memento and the ongoing Once Upon a Time in the West, plus one almost completely rules-free LARP session.) In the case of Memento, going into that game, I had a large amount of familiarity with the LARP mechanics for Changeling (i.e. what sorts of things their powers did, though there were occasional points of massive discrepancy between the two sets of rules), and a similarly large amount of familiarity with basic World of Darkness tabletop mechanics (i.e. how combat and such worked, though certain Changeling-specific rules were new to me).
That isn’t the case with OTW, and man, is this an eye-opening experience.
With all due respect to certain readers of this journal who were involved in the design of Scion, there are some honking big holes in the mechanics, which I mostly find when we fall into them headfirst. For example, there’s a first-level Justice Boon which allows you to accuse somebody of a specific crime and know if they’re guilty or not. The rules specifically tell you that the roll isn’t contested by the suspect’s player. So, in theory, a brand-new Scion of Tyr could walk up to Loki and say, “Loki! You arranged for Baldur to be murdered!” And know immediately that Loki was guilty. Erm, no: I respectfully submit that a trickster god should not be so easily caught, unless he wants to be. Also, there are a truckload of Manipulation knacks that have no mechanic for resistance; you could just say to Loki, “Tell the truth!” and he would have to obey, at least briefly. This seems unbalanced to me.
But the interesting thing to me — and the point where I diverge from some of the attitudes I saw expressed on the Forge, back when I was reading their forums — is that I don’t think house-ruling is necessarily a sign of failure on the part of the game designer. I do think the examples I’ve just given are things that would have been better fixed before I got my hands on the book, but that isn’t true of everything. For example, I prefer to have Legend increases (which are kind of like level increases) happen at narratively appropriate points, rather than whenever a given player saves up enough XP to buy the next dot. Ergo, our house-rule is that I announce when the PCs all go up in Legend, and in return they don’t have to pay for it. That’s a personal choice, not necessarily a flaw in the original design.
Then there’s the stuff that isn’t broken, I just have to learn how to use it. Boy howdy, does it make a difference how familiar you are with a system before you start running it: things like “what difficulty should this roll be?” and “will this opponent be somebody the PCs can take down?” and so on are tricky enough when you’re trying to remember which of the eighteen different White Wolf dodge mechanics this system uses, and a good deal harder when you start throwing in system-specific powers that can really change the odds. Scion has a particularly brutal setup on that front, I think, because of the way epic attributes scale. I think the scaling is appropriate — we’re talking about characters on their way to becoming gods, after all — but it makes me remember that the one thing I like out of D&D mechanics is the nicely mathematical formulae for calculating challenge ratings.
And yet, I wouldn’t want to run D&D, because I find its rules too confining for the kind of game I want to run. (Or for that matter, play in: most of my D&D experience was in a game that was really just a Forgotten Realms game, a world for which D&D happened to be the system. We regularly threw the rules out the window, and got by on group consensus.) It all just hammers home to me that whatever some die-hard fans preach, there is no such thing as a perfect system: there are systems better or worse suited to what you want to do; there are systems you know well or poorly and navigate accordingly; there are systems with more or fewer obvious mechanical holes. Only that third aspect rests in the hands of the game designer.
And that’s why we don’t live in a world where every game runs on GURPS or d20 mods. But I admit, there are times when I think about how much easier my gaming life would be if I only had to know one system. 🙂
One of the odd perks of my sleep schedule (going to bed circa 2 or 3 a.m. West Coast time, waking up circa 10 or 11 a.m.) is that most U.S.-based people have started their business day before I get up. And that means a disproportionate number of the e-mails I get saying “I’d like to buy your story!” are in my inbox by the time I shuffle into my office, starting my day with a smile.
Which is by way of saying that Pseudopod will be doing an audio reprint of “The Snow-White Heart,” which originally came out in the final issue of Talebones.
It’s hard to say how many words I wrote today, since some of it involved replacing a bit of scene I’d written before, but it’s definitely north of 5K.
This is what happens when I let myself work on something other than What I Should Be Working On. (Even if the something else is, technically, also something I should be working on. It ain’t the novel currently under deadline, which is all that really matters.)
Tomorrow, we see if we can’t polish off that nearly-finished short story, and get some other stuff done, too.
A question for my buff female friends: how many push-ups can you do?
(I ask for story purposes. I’m doing Fun Work, and need to know how many my jock protagonist would do if she felt like showing off. Which she does, ’cause she’s like that.)
It occurs to me A Star Shall Fall isn’t the only book I could do a giveaway for. If you don’t already have a copy of In Ashes Lie (or want one that’s signed), you can now try to get one over on GoodReads. (That one goes until August 7th; you have until this Friday to put your name in for the offered copy of Star.)
I had grand plans of doing some “fun work” (that is to say, writing that isn’t the novel) tonight.
Hah. I’m going to curl up in bed with Red Hood’s Revenge and read until I ptfo.
Work can resume tomorrow.
If I didn’t have a very full day planned for tomorrow, I would totally stay up and see if I can knock off the final scene of this part. As it stands, I’ll have to call it a night after only 4,441 words.
Favorite line: “So that’s where the fucking naga went.” Surprise naga for the win!
(Do me a favor and forget about the naga by the time the book comes out next year. Otherwise it won’t be a surprise.)
Edited to add: Eh, screw it. Sleep is for the weak. And this way I’ll get to kick back properly tomorrow night.
Edit 2: 5,731, and that’s Part Two in the bag. I’ll probably have to fix the end of that scene — it went a bit woppy-jawed after I decided to postpone the Giant Screaming Match until the beginning of Part Three — but whatever. I’m putting this thing, and myself, to bed.
P.S. — 86,040 words of book.
Another link I’ve had sitting around for a couple of weeks: Abd el-Kader and the Massacre of Damascus.
Read the whole thing. Yes, it’s long, and we live in an age of attention-deficit disorder, where any blog post longer than a few paragraphs threatens to trigger a tl;dr response. But you need to go through it to grasp the enormity of this man’s life: not just what Abd el-Kader accomplished in his fifteen years fighting the French (notice how many times he wrestled them into stalemates or surrenders or treaties?), but the incredible reversal of his image later on, while he was in France, and when he went to Damascus. It’s an amazing story.
I’m writing a novel set in 1884 London right now, and I’m running a game set in the 1875 American frontier, and I’m juggling a back-brain idea that would take place in a world a lot like our own nineteenth century but with differences, and coincidentally kniedzw is reading a biography of Sir Henry Rawlinson, who’s one of your crazy Victorian soldier-scholar-adventurers, and it really makes me want to know: what was it about the nineteenth century that spawned so many larger-than-life characters?
Some of it’s a matter of wealth and privilege. If you don’t have to work for a living, and you don’t particularly care what offenses you commit against your lessers, you can get away with much grander deeds than somebody constrained by budget and consideration. Some of it’s a colonial effect, as the collision of nations destabilized the world and created zones where individuals could make their own law. I think a portion, especially in the case of men like Rawlinson, was an invincible belief in the gospel of progress: there was nothing that they couldn’t do, and if somebody tried and failed and died, well, it was just a sign that you needed to try again harder.
That doesn’t explain Abd el-Kader to me, though. He probably counted as wealthy and privileged in the context of his own Algerian society, but not in comparison to the French, and part of what made his story awesome was that he did constrain himself not to harm those over whom he had power. He wasn’t a colonial adventurer, either, indoctrinated by the European belief in progress. He was just a leader and military genius with an unshakeable goodness of character that gradually won over even his enemies, who found himself in a position to save thousands of lives. And yet he hits that same button in my head, of people whose deeds loom so large in my head, I have a hard time imagining anyone following a similar path today.
Maybe it’s just the perspective of time. Maybe in a hundred years, people who seem ordinary to me today will have the same sheen of outrageousness. It doesn’t feel like it, though. Western history* has colorful characters at all stages, but it seems like there are more in the nineteenth century; and then the things we do today feel smaller, more hedged about by caution and limitation, less grand. In a hundred years, we’ll remember Bill Gates — but his autobiography won’t be stuffed with anecdotes about how as a boy he tried to summon the devil in an attempt to verify the existence of same**.
Possibly it’s better for society as a whole that we have changed (if indeed we have). But every time I come across another figure like Abd el-Kader, the narrative part of my brain lights up a bit with joy, and I wish current events could do that to me.
*My knowledge of non-Western history is intermittent enough that I don’t want to generalize about it.
**Unlike Charles Babbage.
I think I’ll try to do about one of these a week until A Star Shall Fall releases: if you head on over to Goodreads, you can enter the drawing for a giveaway of another ARC.
(I’ll also do at least one more giveaway here on LJ, so you won’t have to be a member of Goodreads to try and snag a copy.)
The 80K landmark used to mean more to me. It still means “real book” in a way lower numbers don’t; it’s hard to sell an adult book that’s less than eighty thousand words long. But it used to mean I was well over halfway done with the novel, maybe seventy or eighty percent of the way there.
And then I started writing Onyx Court books. <sigh>
On the bright side, I’m close enough to the end of Part Two that I can taste it. Barring disaster, I’ll be done by the end of the month (which is the goal); I may even finish in the next day or two, if I decide to marathon my way through Eliza and Dead Rick’s big climactic scenes. (And that will mostly be determined by how quickly I figure out how to wrangle my plot-pieces together in an exciting fashion.)
Word count: 80, 309
LBR quota: Rhetoric, maybe? That’s what usually covers faerie science, and Dead Rick is actually flexing his teeny-tiny scholar muscle.
Authorial sadism: Neither Dead Rick, nor Eliza, nor Tom, will ever know that the pieces briefly came together there on Cheapside. (Several months too late for Eliza.)
Why is it that, without fail, museum shops never have the thing I want to buy?
I’ll go through an exhibit and there will be some painting or sculpture or artifact or whatever that just charms me or blows me away, and when I get to the museum shop, I begin an eager race around the room, wanting to take some memento of that piece home with me . . . but there’s nothing. No print of the painting. No postcard showing the artifact. Nada.
The worst offender in my memory was probably the touring exhibit of The Lord of the Rings films. I walked out of that thing prepared to buy anything, man — replica costumes, replica weapons, replica jewelry, you name it, I would have bought it, because seeing the craftsmanship of the props up close had impressed me so much I was ready to pay for a cheap knockoff of my own. Instead they had some hoodies, some jewelry not from the films, a bunch of books, and that was about it. The incident sparking this post was my visit to the Asian Art Museum’s Shanghai exhibit yesterday: among the works showing how Shanghainese artists experimented with combining western and traditional Chinese techniques, there was a giant wall scroll depicting plum blossoms in moonlight, and it was stunning. The brushwork of Chinese ink painting, and the play of light and shadow of Western art; it wouldn’t have looked as cool on a postcard, probably, losing the vibrancy of the real thing, but I would have bought it as a way of sparking my brain to recall the original.
Nope. No dice.
The Impressionist exhibit at the Legion of Honor had a neat thing set up on a computer screen in their shop: you could pick a work of art, pick a size, pick a frame, and have a custom print shipped to your house. Awesome — except the selection of works you could do this with was tiny. (And, naturally, didn’t include any of the ones I really liked.) I do understand there are practical limitations on producing memorabilia of everything in an exhibit, but my batting average on this is abysmal. The things I like are never the ones chosen for reproduction. Oh museum shops, why do you hate me so?
I don’t know what it is, but within the last year or two, the synopses on the Apple movie trailers site have just become abysmal. Not so much in content — though a few of them are irritatingly content-free, leaving me with no sense of what the film is about — but style. A sentence from the synopsis for Lovely, Still: “What begins as an odd and awkward encounter quickly blossoms into what appears to be a romantic late life love affair that takes us on a heartfelt and wonderful journey which takes an unexpected turn.”
Okay, seriously? The first thing that caught me was the repetition of “takes,” which made me notice they had this whole daisy-chain of subordinate clauses, plus you’ve got that “appears to be” (what, is it actually a CIA plot? a behavioral experiment by a psych student? a dream in the head of an old man in a nursing home, that he’ll wake up from at the end?) cluttering up your sentence, and gahhhhhhhhh. Not to mention the tendency in these things to tell me how heartfelt and moving or thrilling or hilarious or whatever the film will be, which really makes me want to hit the writer with a raw fish, because if you tell me that, I automatically disbelieve you. And don’t get me started on the hideous cliches that get deployed in some of these things.
I don’t know where they get them from, but I hope to god it isn’t the marketing department for the films themselves. It would be appalling to think the people who pour months or years of their lives into making a movie would pay somebody to promote it so badly.
No release date yet that I know of, but Patrick Swenson just posted the cover for the Best of Talebones anthology. I’m really looking forward to this one; I have some past issues of the magazine, but only a few, so it’ll be nice to have a one-stop shop for the highlights from its whole run.
Once again, I’m building up a raft of tabs in my Firefox bar — but since I’m still trying to do that “more posts of substance” thing, I don’t want to knock them all off with a linkdump. So let me see if I can’t get around to discussing these things.
io9 had a good piece recently: Is “avoiding tropes” the same thing as telling fresh stories?
On the one hand, yes, if you define “trope” as “something that’s been done before” and “fresh” as “something that hasn’t been done before.” As Charlie Jane Anders points out, TV Tropes has gotten so obsessively detailed, the term has gone well beyond applying to full-on cliches (things that have been overused to the point of being worn out) to just about anything that might be seen as a pattern, however minor. But Anders goes on to say, Maybe we tend — and by “we,” I definitely mean “me,” among others — to fixate on the presence or absence of too-familiar story elements, instead of thinking about whether the story as a whole was fresh, or strong, and whether it moved us. And that suggests a different connotation for the word “fresh,” that doesn’t restrict it solely to a sense of “pure novelty.”
I’ve come to realize over time that I don’t care as much as some people seem to about novelty. Possibly because it’s both so easy and so hard to pull off: hard because any given idea, taken in isolation, has probably been done before (after all, we are the proverbial million monkeys with typewriters, telling stories for thousands of years), and easy because all you have to do is stick something random into an unexpected context. A guy moving to the big city with dreams of striking it rich is a trope; Jesus opting out of being crucified because he wants to make it as an actor in Rome is a novelty. The latter may be original, but that doesn’t make it good.
And the thing about tropes is, they happen because they work. The pattern is one that speaks to something within the audience’s hearts and minds. One person tries it; the story resonates with a lot of people; it becomes a piece of the toolkit for other storytellers. There’s a point at which trope-avoidance becomes an exercise in not doing any of the things you know will work.
Having said that, some caveats. Sometimes the thing a trope speaks to in the audience isn’t so good; What These People Need Is a Honky (the insertion of a white hero to save the poor beleaguered non-white people) is a splendid example of one that’s both common and problematic. Other times, the trope’s power to move the audience is diminished by overuse; the twist at the end of The Sixth Sense worked for many people because they weren’t expecting it, but then Shyamalan became known for sticking twists into the ends of his movies, so they lost the surprise factor and much of what made them effective. And what holds true on the micro level may fall apart on the macro; I won’t necessarily ding you for telling a story about a farmboy in a fantasy world who gets swept up into epic events, but if he also has a grey-bearded magical advisor and a faithful friend and an elf and a dwarf and a ranger and a magical artifact that needs to be destroyed in order stop the Dark Lord from taking over, then we’re not talking about a trope, we’re talking about an entire insta-kit of them that you’ve assembled according to the instruction booklet.
For me, “freshness” boils down to the ability to make me sit up and pay attention. Sometimes you can achieve that by doing the unexpected, but you can also do the expected so well that it comes to life as if I’ve never seen it before. The characters are so vivid, the plot developments so sharply executed, that I can’t spare the brain cells to think about other stories that have done the same thing before; I’m too absorbed in the drama you’ve pulled me into. There’s nothing wrong with using the tools your forebears crafted ages ago, so long as you use them with skill. Unlike the “entirely new” approach, there’s evidence that those tools actually work.
This is an interesting post about the “top idea” in your head — the thing that your thoughts will drift to in the absence of anything else to occupy them.
For me, it’s almost always stories, of one kind or another. When I’m mid-novel, it generally ought to be the project at hand; that’s how I work through my plot complications and worldbuilding ideas. But it isn’t always, because sometimes my brain gets tired of all that heavy lifting, and searches frantically for something else to do. This is part of where the “new shiny” phenomenon comes from: inspiration strikes for something else, and it briefly takes over as the top idea in your head, pushing aside thoughts of what you should be doing. It’s also why I’m not good at working on two large projects at once; then they vie for dominance in my head, and I ricochet back and forth between them in a way that sometimes works but doesn’t always. That’s my current problem, actually. At any given moment, my thoughts may drift to the novel, or to a proposal I’m preparing to send to my agent, or to the game I’m running. Right now I’m stuck in gear #2, and I need to shift to gear #3, but it isn’t so easy to change out top ideas on command. (Today is a day off from the novel, which means five minutes from now I’ll probably be thinking about Dead Rick instead of what to do to with the PCs in our session tonight.)
And it’s very much why I have a problem with conflict. If I get into an argument, it instantaneously takes over my head, so that every three seconds I find myself rehashing what the other person said, or what I said in response, or what they might say in reply to my response or what I should have said but didn’t and gngaaaaaaagh. I disagree with Graham that disputes “have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance” — unless he’s specifically defining “dispute” as an argument without substance — but even if they do have substance, they often cripple my ability to get anything else done, up to and including dealing with the problem the argument is about. I really ought to just stay out of them, but that’s easier said than done.
Anyway, I like the phrase “top idea” as a descriptor for that thing you keep going back to in idle moments. (I also like “ambient thinking” as a descriptor for that process.) It’s worth thinking about how I can manage that more carefully, so that I neither burn myself out, nor get distracted by the shiny things trying to hijack the position.
I had a prioritized list of things I needed to do today, with three items on it.
Woke up and found something had happened that added another item to that list, which I put in at position #1. Now I’ve spent the last hour or so working on #3.
So much for prioritized lists.
Booklist‘s opinion on A Star Shall Fall:
Brennan’s historical research is as impeccable as ever, and the twining of the two worlds is the best yet. Fans of the Onyx court novels, and anyone who enjoys historical fantasy, should like A Star Shall Fall.
And also bookblather:
A Star Shall Fall starts fast and goes faster, despite its apparent length. The climax is brilliant. I honestly did not want to put the book down or close it for any reason, and I was sniffly for a good while afterwards. This is one spectacular book; Brennan is firing on all authorial cylinders. I finished it and wanted to start it all over again, just to have some more time with the characters.
Forty days until the book comes out, and that means it’s time for another excerpt! You’ve already met Irrith and Galen St. Clair; now it’s time for them to meet each other. Or, if you missed the earlier excerpts, you can start at the beginning.
Also, don’t forget the contests for the launch party. Even if you aren’t attending Sirens, you can still enter a drink recipe and win a bound copy of Deeds of Men. You have until August 15th!
If you’re interested in the Clockwork Phoenix 3 anthology, you can read a sample story from it — “Lineage,” by Kenneth Schneyer — and then enter to win a free copy, all courtesy of Fantasy Book Critic.
