all the comet news you can shake a stick at

It’s now sixty days until A Star Shall Fall reaches shelves, so you know what that means: more excerpt! This time we introduce the book’s faerie protagonist, Irrith, first seen in Ashes. Or, if you’ve missed the excerpts so far, you can start at the beginning.

In honor of that — and of the fact that the Science Fiction Book Club will be printing Star as a featured selection, which is the news that greeted me when I woke up this morning — and of the fact that I’ve joined Goodreads — I’m doing another ARC giveaway, this time over on their site. You have until the twelfth to toss your name into the hat for a copy.

Edited to add: Sorry, the Goodreads giveaway is US and Canada only. If you live elsewhere, stay tuned in this space for other opportunities.

the Wikipedia Limit

So I’m running this game, and it’s set in the 1875 frontier, which is not an area or time period I know very much about.

I have this knee-jerk reflex to research the hell out of it. Gee, I wonder where that came from? I’m having to actively remind myself this is a game, not a novel somebody’s paying me for, and so while research is okay, obsessive amounts of it are not. Thus I have instituted the Wikipedia Limit: I am allowed to read as many Wikipedia articles as I like in the course of doing game prep, but if figuring something out would require more in-depth reading, then I say “screw it” and just make something up.

There are exceptions to this rule. The major one is for Native American matters — religion especially — because Wikipedia’s coverage of those isn’t good. I’m also allowed to google phrases like “famous [fill in type] people” to get a list of names I will then look up on Wikipedia. But if I discover, as happened just a few minutes ago, that a person I want to include in the next session was arrested in 1875, but Wikipedia doesn’t say when in 1875, then I am allowed to decree it happened after this session’s events were over. Which I would never permit myself to do for the Onyx Court.

Thank god for Wikipedia, because it’s actually a really great resource for this kind of thing, offering me (in most cases) plenty of information for my purposes. But it’s funny, how hard it is to hold myself to that limit.

two bits of short story news

First, Clockwork Phoenix 3 debuts today. This contains “The Gospel of Nachash,” which is my Bible + Sekrit Ingredient story. The whole anthology series has been pretty awesome, full of (as the subtitle has it) “beauty and strangeness;” I highly recommend all three volumes. (And not just ’cause I’m in them.)

Second, there will be audio of “And Blow Them at the Moon,” the Onyx Court Gunpowder Plot story. Which hasn’t been published yet, but I still wanted to mention the audio version is coming, if you prefer to consume your short fiction aurally.

for the gamers reading this

If you’re a fan of White Wolf’s Scion game, I just discovered they’ve put out a new supplement, covering the Yazata, the Persian gods. So far it’s only a .pdf, though it looks like there are plans to do a print edition early next year.

What interests me about this is that, according to the place where I first saw it mentioned, the supplement is based on fan-created material. Scion‘s original books covered a wide range of polytheistic religions (Egyptian, Greco-Roman, Norse, Aztec/Mayan, Japanese, Voudoun, Celtic, Chinese, and Hindu), but there are still parts of the world they missed, and so there seems to be a small but energetic base of people designing additions to the system. (I’m using a fan-created supplement as the basis for my own handling of native North American religions; with my game set in the 19th-century frontier, I needed something to address that question.)

A quick glance at the original Yazata writeup, that I downloaded when I first began looking at fan supplements, shows there’s been a non-trivial amount of revision. For example, the pantheon-specific purview — which is probably the biggest hurdle for pantheon design — appears to have been completely replaced. Also, the new purview of Time has been renamed as Stars and changed on various points, though it still mostly has to do with the manipulation of time. So this tells me that White Wolf didn’t just grab the old pdf, typeset it to look like the rest of the books, and fling it out there; somebody, somewhere along the line, sat down and reworked things. I don’t know if that was the original designer, someone at White Wolf, or what, but they put some effort into it.

Which really pleases me. This is potentially the ideal way to handle Scion expansions, at least of the “pantheon module” sort: it’s a small enough addition that it doesn’t really justify putting out a big expensive hardcover book, but vital enough that it’s worth picking the good ones out of the mass of stuff on the internet and distributing them in an organized fashion.

Of course, one big concern is accuracy. I’ve been very pleased by the quality of the White Wolf-produced material; I’m enough of a mythology geek that I would have been put off by shoddy research, but everywhere I know the material, their work looks solid. (And this goes beyond the familiar grounds of Greek and Norse mythology. When the first book came out, my litmus test was to look at the Mesoamerican gods. They listed three alternate names for Quetzalcoatl, two of which I recognized, the third being something I’d never seen in my life. Which told me they’d done more research than I had, which was basically my minimum requirement for the game.) Is the fan-created Persian material accurate? I have no idea. I know that there are (at least) two Native American supplements out there, one of which calls the pantheon the “Anasazi” and boils the entire thing down to archetypes like “the Trickster” or “Mother Earth;” that is NOT the one I’m using. If you open the door to fan-created material, you may end up trusting that whoever wrote that supplement knows what they’re talking about, and you may be wrong. So I hope there’s still a degree of quality control happening on the White Wolf end, before they put their stamp of approval on something. The changes to the Yazata writeup make me hope that it’s so, even though I can’t judge them for myself.

I’m also a bit curious as to how White Wolf is handling rights and compensation, but that’s probably private information I’m not likely to get. If they’re paying a fair price and not exploiting their fans, though, this is potentially a very cool way to approach the question of expansion.

Now on Goodreads!

I’ve just set myself up on Goodreads, including a syndication of my LJ here. It’s something I’ve meant to do for a while, and now I’ve got it up and rolling, so I’m pretty happy.

deathslogging to 50K

Remember back at the beginning of May, when I was stuck on the 15K treadmill? I had to replace some of Eliza’s scenes, so I would put in a full day’s work of writing, then paste it into place and discover my wordcount had essentially not changed.

Second verse, same as the first, a little bit louder, a little bit worse.

Dead Rick also needed a lot of scene replacements. (This is apparently my New Method of novel-writing. I want my Old Method back.) I could’t really afford to stop dead on forward progress, so my plan lately has been to hit the book from both ends, writing substitute material for him, while also adding new material for Eliza. But for a while there every scene I swapped in turned out to be a few hundred words shorter than what had been there before, so despite doing a thousand or eleven hundred or twelve hundred words of forward progress, my total wordcount was only inching along. Yesterday I wrote three thousand words for a gain of about five hundred. It’s felt a lot like running up the down escalator: a hell of effort for slower-than-average progress.

Which is why it feels like such a victory that I finally have fifty thousand words of book. And I’m almost done with the replacements; just one more thing needs swapping out, and then there’s one new scene I’m going to write for Part One. Okay, I just lied through my teeth: I still have to go back and redo that pair of scenes for Eliza, that I’ve been meaning to do ever since I got back from London. But I’ve got those clear enough in my head that I’ve been able to write her side of Part Two just fine without having backtracked first, so there’s less pressure there. (As opposed to Dead Rick, whose plot had gone so badly astray that I’m only just now starting to see what he’ll be doing in Part Two.)

I’m just hoping I don’t have to keep doing this scene-replacement thing, because man, as writing processes go, this one kind of sucks. But as long as it turns out a good book in the end, I’ll live.

Word count: 50,640
LBR quota: Tonight’s Dead Rick work was mostly blood. Louisa got some love, though.
Authorial sadism: The Goodemeades are good at subtly applying guilt trips.

not quite too late

You may recall hearing about Peter Watts (Canadian scientist and science fiction author) being beaten and arrested at the U.S. border. If not, well, go here for references that will tell you what happened.

My primary reason for that link, though, is the fundraiser Cat Sparks is setting up. One of Watts’ short stories is up for a Hugo this year, and since (as a convicted felon) he can’t attend future conventions on U.S. soil, it would be especially nice if he could attend WorldCon in Australia. Aussicon has comped his membership; the fundraiser is to pay for his airfare and hotel. They’ve almost got enough, but they’re a few dollars short, and so (despite being terribly late in posting this), I’m tossing it out there for interested parties to see.

Since the money is being handled through Paypal, this is purely a donation thing. The fact that Watts may end up chosing the name of a donor for tuckerization (that is, there will be a character in his next book with that name, who will probably die horribly) is pure coincidence. So is the fact that there are other things being given away. These are not prizes. Just coincidence. Nothing more.

Ahem.

Anyway, the story of Watts’ conviction is a deeply frustrating one, so if you can spare even five bucks to help him get to Australia, please do.

religion in SF linkage

I’ve had this open in a tab for long enough that I no longer remember who I got the link from, but: back in 2009, the blog Only a Game did a series of posts on religion in various science fiction texts. Not invented religions, but real-world faiths (though sometimes in future-adapted forms), and the ways in which books or TV shows or movies either represent the practice of faith, or grapple with the concepts behind those faiths.

The series starts here with an introduction (which as a second part a few posts later); the first actual discussion of a text is here, tackling Frank Herbert’s Dune. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a good way to link to the series specifically; the only tag they have is “serial,” and since the blog seems to do a lot of serial discussions, that pulls up a whole swath of more recent posts. But if you start at one of those two points, there are links at the bottom leading you onward to later installments, so you can skip the intervening entries on other topics.

I’ve touched briefly on the subject of religion in science fiction before, noting that the dominant message sent by SF as a whole seems to be that we’ll have gotten over that religion thing by the time the future arrives. There are exceptions, of course, texts that don’t assume the future will mean jettisoning faith, but they do seem like exceptions to me. And I suppose that view makes sense if you assume the primary cause and purpose of religion is the need to explain why the world works the way it does, and if you also make the corollary assumptions that 1) eventually science will be able to explain all of those things much better and 2) we are inevitably moving toward more science, not less. But I take issue with all three of those assumptions: contra Frazer, I think religion isn’t just for explaining the world’s functioning; I also think there are issues (like ethics) that science is poorly-equipped to handle*; and I know way too much about historical instances where scientific knowledge was lost to assume we’re just going to keep climbing that hill. If you define SF narrowly as featuring more advanced tech than we have now, then sure, clearly the future as seen in SF will not have to deal with the question of a new Dark Age. But I still think it’s facile to assume the impulse toward religion will have vanished along the way.

It will have changed, certainly. I never read more than the first Dune book, so until I read these posts I didn’t know Herbert had explored “Mahayana Christianity” and “Zensunni Catholicism” as speculative fusions of current religious traditions. I’d love to see more books that do something like that, imagining futuristic Buddhism or the Church of Christ Digital or what have you. So if you know of any, please recommend them in the comments.

*Please note that I don’t think religion is the only source of ethics. Atheists are perfectly capable of coming up with reasons not to steal from or murder one another; philosophers have been hashing out the issue of ethics for ages, and not always from a religious starting point. But if people have continue to have questions about why evil exists, or what their obligation is to their fellow man, I don’t think they’re likely to find satisfactory answers in string theory.

music lists

arielstarshadow, a while ago — where “a while” is “about six months” — you mentioned you’d be interested in seeing my playlists for the Onyx Court books, the stuff I had on shuffle while writing, that the soundtracks got built out of. Well, since I recently found myself with occasion to mail those playlists to someone, I figured I might as well go ahead and put them up on my website. The Midnight playlists are here, and the Ashes playlists are here.

They’re just .txt files, and moderately illegible; when iTunes exports a playlist, it includes all the file information, and it was already enough work just cleaning out the chaff so you could see what the titles, composers, and albums were. I didn’t feel like doing even more work to make it pretty. Also, most of it is film scores. But if that’s the kind of thing you’re interested in — especially the dark-and-atmospheric end of film scores — you can scan through and see what I’ve been listening to.

TV musings: Bones

This show is a good example of the Netflix Effect: there are other things I’m more interested in watching, but they’re not available as streaming video, and Bones is. Laziness being a mighty thing, I end up watching the one that is more easily available. (This has its limits; I’ve streamed things where I’ve watched an episode or two — or in one case, five minutes — and promptly given up. But if a show is decent, and also immediately available, it wins.)

Anyway, I wanted to talk a bit about the show, because it’s a story and I can’t not think about stories when they’re in front of me. So far, I’ve watched two seasons, and the first few eps of S3.

As with most ensemble shows, the big appeal is the supporting cast: I am totally there for Hodgins and Zack and Angela, and Goodman (in S1) and Camille (in S2). I am absurdly fond of characters who combine geekiness + gruesomeness, so all the banter about dead bodies and such? I’m there. Given the kerfuffle I saw a little while ago over the plans to axe 2/3 of the female cast from Criminal Minds, I should also give props to the people behind Bones for bringing Camille in at the start of S2, making for a 50/50 balance in the core cast — only it’s more than that, really, because the lab scenes are often dominated by Brennan, Camille, and Angela, with Zack and Hodgins more playing support, and man, it’s nice after all these shows with their one token female character.

Of the two protagonists, Brennan* may be the more important one, but Booth is the one I enjoy. David Boreanaz is capable of less wooden performances than his stint as Angel led me to believe, and I like the way they handle his backstory angst: the scripts rarely wallow in it (at least in the two seasons I’ve seen), but it’s there, and gets brought up when it should be. (My favorite instance probably being an ep where Brennan said of a character, “I wish I had killed him.” Booth’s response: a very curt, “no, you don’t,” and then he got up from the table and left.) Their interactions are reasonably entertaining, and if I have one macro complaint on that front, it’s that I’d like a little more drama to leaven the comedy. But halfway through S2 they had a nice little run of eps that gave me exactly that, so maybe I’ll get more in the future.

My real macro complaint, though — and my real problem with Brennan — has to do with the way the show handles anthropology.

Forensic stuff first, because my comments here are fairly brief. I don’t know much about this field beyond some very basic elements of osteology, but it looks reasonably solid to my eye. The only thing that makes me roll my eyes is when they glance at a skeleton and instantly rattle off its sex, age, and race; that requires measurements, and even then the answer is often a matter of statistical probability, not certainty. But it would get old really fast if every episode showed the characters checking for fusion of the epiphyses and measuring the angle of the greater sciatic notch, and besides, the basic demographic facts of a the corpse du jour are usually not the interesting part of the story. So I’m fine with the scripts eliding that part and getting on to the more complicated questions.

What does bug me is the cultural anthropology. Oh, good lord, the cultural anthropology.

Cut to spare your flists

Manute Bol

I don’t have a lot to say about this. I don’t really follow the world of sports — basketball or otherwise — so I’d never heard of Manute Bol until that Slacktivist piece and another article, posted just a little while before he died. (Sadly, I lost the link for that one; it included more in the way of quotes from Bol, giving his feelings on basketball and the Sudan and the intersection of the two).

But I wanted to post this because I don’t get the impression many people knew more than a passing bit about him, whether they follow the world of sports or not. And that’s a great tragedy, in my eyes. Here’s a guy who didn’t spend his newfound wealth on big houses, fast cars, drugs to inject or snort or smoke: he kept enough to live on, and poured the rest into bettering the lives of people back home.

I don’t demand that all sports celebrities (or all celebrities of any stripe) wear hair shirts and take vows of poverty for the greater good. But when a guy comes along who sees his fame and wealth as a gift to be shared with others, then I want to do my tiny part to spread his story, as a counter-effect to all the tales of Athletes Behaving Badly.

I hope that, with Manute Bol gone, the good he fought for isn’t forgotten.

game ideas I don’t have time to run

Changelings (in the Changeling: The Dreaming sense) strike back against the Banality of the modern world by adapting to a mythology modern Americans are prepared to believe in:

They frame themselves as superheroes.

Wind Runner to fly, Flicker Flash to teleport, Quicksilver for super-speed . . . Skycraft to throw lightning, Pyretics to throw fire . . . the troll birthright for super-strength . . . you can’t duplicate every power ever given to superheroes in the comics, but you don’t have to. You just have to get far enough, and then let the bright spandex costumes do the rest. Clark Kent turning into Superman is just a question of calling upon the Wyrd.

(Nockers as gadgeteer heroes. Holy crap, does that make Batman a nocker?)

I so don’t have time to run this, but. The idea amuses me.

Updated with ideas, from kniedzw and me wandering around the farmer’s market:
Batman’s a Dougal sidhe, not a nocker, provided you can find a good physical flaw. Iron Man is ABSOLUTELY a Dougal. Superman’s a troll; he even wears blue! Spiderman, maybe a spider pooka. Catwoman, cat pooka definitely. Cyclops as a Balor who’s trying to be good? <g> And the Incredible Hulk fighting against his ogre nature’s worst instincts. Aquaman as merfolk. Swamp Thing as a ghille dhu. Gambit as an eshu with Legerdemain. Mr. Fantastic maybe has Metamorphosis (Go Ask Alice, applied selectively); Human Torch has Pyretics. Storm has Skycraft, obviously. Can’t really do Rogue, or Professor X’s telepathy. I could see Wonder Woman as a Gwydion, maybe. I’d probably make Wolverine’s claws a Treasure, implanted in him by a crazy nocker.

short-notice research!

Apparently I need to Know Stuff about the early history of photography for the Victorian book. Any buffs out there who might know a good book I could read about it? I pretty much only care about nineteenth-century technology; later developments are less relevant for my purposes.

Hollywood Plays It Safe

A lot of people rant about the fact that all Hollywood seems to be putting out these days are sequels, adaptations, and remakes. While there’s a grain of truth to that, I decided recently that I’m going to stop being angry at them for it — for the simple reason that if I were in their shoes, I’d probably do the same.

Because making a movie is expensive. Sure, if your story is about hipster twentysomethings having relationship dysfunction, or a suburban family gathering for the holidays, then you can make your film for twenty thousand dollars on a handheld digital camera. On the high end, it might cost a few million, depending on the paycheck your actors demand. But my favorite genres are SF, fantasy, action, etc, and the price tag on those is a lot higher. So when it comes to those genres — surprise! — Hollywood plays it safe.

Remember, the definition of “a risk” is that it might blow up in your face. That’s one thing if your ten-million-dollar romantic comedy only makes back seven million or so . . . but apply that same ratio to a two-hundred-million-dollar sci-fi extravaganza, and the losses become a lot more appalling. A big-name director might still have a career on the far side of such a failure; anybody below their rank might never work in that town again.

And one way to hedge your risk is to film stories that have already been test-driven. Sequel? If people enjoyed the first one, you’ve already got a built-in audience, and so long as you don’t massively screw it up they’re likely to turn out for a new installment of the same. (Human nature; I also don’t blame audiences for acting that way. Especially since I do it myself.) Adaptation? There are differences between storytelling on the page and storytelling on the screen, but allowing for those differences, you know in advance that the story resonates with people. (Plus you can cross-promote, which is always a plus.) Remake? Take something people have a nostalgic fondness for, and update it for modern aesthetic sensibilities, that want something better than forgotten ’80s B-list actors and rubber monster suits. It may not save you; sequels and adaptations and remakes have all tanked. But at least you have some basis for guessing how they’ll do, even if that guess turns out to be wildly wrong; with a new story, you might as well throw darts at a dartboard. And when you have to justify to a studio how you lost so much of their money, I’m betting it helps to be able to point to good book sales or something else in that vein, see, we had reason to think it would work, as opposed to admitting you flung yourself off a cliff with a parachute that had never been tested before.

There are kinds of playing-it-safe-ness that I don’t excuse. “Our hero has to be a Standard Beefy White Guy, because we don’t trust that audiences want to see women or minorities do cool things” — no. And god knows I would like to see original films be original, with plots I haven’t seen a million times before, even though I realize that’s a lot more likely at the Moon price tag than the Avatar one. But a Hollywood that made a lot more big-budget original films than sequels, adaptations, and remakes is also a Hollywood that would rapidly run itself halfway out of business: pretty soon Moon would be the biggest thing they could afford to make. Hollywood isn’t and never will be the home for daring experiments. That’s what the smaller studios are for, the people outside the main system.

So for my own part, I’ve stopped complaining about the conservative game Hollywood is playing. I like the big-budget FX extravaganzas; I admit it, they’re a weakness of mine. So what I do is this: I see the ones that really do appeal to me, the ones that play off a source I really love, or sound like they’re actually decent. I avoid the ones that seem like exploitative crap (Transformers 2, I’m looking at you). And I also go see things like Moon, thereby doing my small part to say that hey, there’s an audience for this, too. Because the small studios are part of the greater film ecosystem, and they’re the place to go if you want to see people taking risks.

Maybe in the long term, it will have an effect. Coming to a theatre near you, in 2021: Moon: The Remake, starring Jaden Smith And A Lot Of Explosions That Weren’t In The Original! With Bonus Sexy Alien Chick!

What Cat said (which I seem to be saying a lot . . .)

yuki_onna on the decline of LJ, and the fact that the first step in getting back to the “glory days” is to pony up and be interesting.

I can’t promise 30 straight days of engaging blogging — in fact, since I’ll probably be sans Internet for a few days in mid-July, it’s quite impossible — but comment here and tell me some topic you’d be interested in seeing me write about, and I’ll see what I can do. Writing is of course fair game for requests, but so is anything else: entertainment, politics, my hobbies, anything where you have reason to think I could say something substantive about it.

The whole reason I’m not interested in Twitter and Facebook is that I prefer content-full posts of moderate length to brief snippets of humour or what have you. Anything I can do to encourage that over here, in my main Internet home, is worth a try.

not what I would do

I know why I’m stalling on tonight’s scene. It’s because the thing Eliza’s about to do is very, very stupid. And it’s not that she thinks about it and decides she’s got to do it anyway, for one reason or another; she doesn’t think about it at all. She just snaps and does it, for no better reason than because her temper gets the better of her.

Which is so profoundly not me, I’d probably find easier to get into the headspace of an alien. I keep trying to figure out how to make the necessary moment happen — but my thoughts keep going in the direction of finding a rational reason for it, something that she hopes to gain, when that isn’t what this scene is about at all. Then when I try to hit it from another angle, figuring out what makes her snap, I come up blank, because my subconscious can’t imagine anything that would make me do the same. My temper can get the better of me, yes, but not to the extent of doing something this ill-advised.

And yet, I know people like this exist. What I want to write isn’t unreasonable; it’s only going to seem unreasonable if I fail to represent it right. Which means I need to figure out the inside of her head, what mixture of emotions produces this explosion, and what its precipitating factor is.

But like I said, an alien might be easier for me to figure out.

Cover time!

This is the extra bit I alluded to yesterday, when I posted my research book list: I finally have a version of the cover that I’m allowed to post. (There may be minor tweaks before it hits the shelves, but they’re along the lines of fiddling with the text, rather than image changes.)

In honor of that, I’ve started putting the page for the book into proper order. Enjoy!

Also: since my image-manipulation skills end at being able to crop and shrink pictures. I will be grateful to anyone who can make a nifty icon out of this, so future book posts can use that rather than the comet image I’ve been employing.

My birthday comes early this year . . . or late

Early because the news comes a couple of months before my birthday, late because it won’t actually become a reality until a couple of months after: the historical thesaurus to the OED will be going online in December.

It feels kind of like a sign from On High, that this won’t be available until after I finish drafting and revisions on the Victorian book (though copy-edits will likely still be ahead of me, and page proofs definitely will). i.e. the universe is saving me from what might otherwise happen, which is that my progress would slow to a crawl as my obsessiveness in checking my word choice shot through the roof.

Anyway. Yes. I’m an enormous geek. Not that this comes as a surprise to anybody who’s been reading this journal. But some of you are enormous geeks, too, so I thought I should share.