I need an icon. (Actually, moonandserpent needs an icon. But he’s sort of agreed that if I get him this icon, he’ll work on the book I want him to be writing. So, I need an icon.)
Can somebody hook me up with a Val-Kilmer-as-Doc-Holliday image with the text “I’ll be your huckleBRAAAIIINS . . . .”?
In other words, a Zombie Doc Holliday icon.
Surely someone on my friends list can produce such a thing.
I’ve had three pro author friends more established than me come into the comments thread on the last post to pat me on the head and reassure me that Kirkus Hates Everything. This does indeed help, as does the quoting from their reviews of Gene Wolfe’s work.
It was an odd little Baby Writer Moment, as I got educated in something new to me (namely, the general snarky disdain of Kirkus, which I had not been aware of before).
Our brains are weird things. Psychologists have apparently established that it takes on average fifteen or so pieces of praise to outweigh one negative response. (As I headed for bed, I started tallying up how many positive reactions I’ve gotten, to see where my personal balance sheet stands. <g> We’re up to roughly eleven, as I count it.) Certainly writer-brain seems to lend itself to mood swings that would get any normal person put on medication: the PW review had my subconscious convinced that my book would storm the world, sweeping all before it, for NONE CAN DENY ITS MAJESTY!!!! Then I read the Kirkus review and dropped straight into the Doldrums of I Suck, do not pass Go, do not collect your royalty check because there won’t be one.
(An exaggeration. The actual emotional reactions have been magnified slightly for the sake of imagery. But only slightly.)
If we were rational beings, this math would make more sense. But we aren’t, and it doesn’t.
Poking around online, I discover that Barnes & Noble’s website actually lists the Kirkus review for MNC, which I didn’t realize had come out already.
I’m ending my day with one hell of a contrast:
A hardworking, sanitized Elizabethan backdrop frames a tortuously passive yarn populated by lifeless characters: Mediocre stuff at best.
It really just makes me boggle. Two people read a novel; one falls over praising it, while the other finds it a remedy for insomnia. Did they read the same book?
It’s hard to understand how radically subjective our reactions to things can be. You’d like to believe there’s some such thing as objective quality, that everybody can agree on the technical merits or flaws of something whether it’s to their taste or not . . . but the truth of the matter is that our reactions are often more informed by subtle factors of preference and mood and what we had for breakfast that morning than they are by any supposedly objective criteria.
And then you’re just tempted to throw your hands up in the air and say, screw it. There’s no such thing as quality, just taste, and you might as well throw darts at a board blindfolded; reactions will be just that scattershot, no matter what you do.
Then you have to sigh, shrug, and go back to working on your stories, in the belief that there is such a thing as quality, and you’ll achieve it (or at least get closer) if you just work hard enough. All the while knowing that some reviewers will fall over praising the result, and others will find it a remedy for insomnia, no matter what you do.
(Those, btw, are the closing lines of the review; I’m not quoting the full thing because the rest is just a summary of the plot, though without any terrible spoilers.)
If I have to be jolted awake by my alarm on a Monday morning when I don’t really want to be up yet . . .
. . . then this is the sort of thing I want waiting for me when I sit down at the computer:
Stunningly conceived and exquisitely achieved, this rich historical fantasy portrays the Elizabethan court 30 years into the reign of the Virgin Queen, often called Gloriana. Far below ground, her dark counterpart, heartless Invidiana, rules England’s fae. Brennan (Warrior and Witch) pairs handsome young courtier Michael Deven, an aspiring agent under spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, with bewitching fae Lune, who attempts to avoid Invidiana’s wrath by infiltrating Walsingham’s network in mortal guise. History and fantasy blend seamlessly as Deven and Lune tread their precarious tightropes between loyalty and betrayal. Brennan’s myriad fantastical creations ring as true as her ear for Elizabethan and faerie dialogue. With intriguing flashbacks to historical events and a cast of deftly drawn characters both real and imagined, Brennan fleshes out the primal conflict of love and honor pitted against raging ambition and lust for power in a glittering age when mortals could well be such fools as to sell their souls forever.
That, folks, is (I believe) my first-ever Publisher’s Weekly review.
It’s starred. And the at the top of the SF/F/H section, too. (Page down if you’re looking for it in context; there’s no way to link directly to that graf.)
(It also happens to be the thing I had to redact from my earlier post; I didn’t realize I wasn’t supposed to mention it until the review itself came out. But I only knew the review would be good; I didn’t know what it said until this morning.)
So, yeah. A very nice thing to wake up to. Paired, as it happens, with an e-mail from a super-sekrit individual planning a different kind of interview for Midnight Never Come, who also loved the book. Did somebody declare today Ego-Stroking Monday and not tell me?
It’s always pleasing when I sell a second story to a given market — proof that the first sale wasn’t a fluke. In this case, the folks buying another piece from me are the Intergalactic Medicine Show (who previously published “Lost Soul”), and the story they have purchased is “A Heretic by Degrees”.
For those who have been playing along at home: yes, that’s a Driftwood story, and the first one to sell. May many more follow in its wake!
Those of you who read kniedzw‘s journal have already heard the news, but for the rest of you: my husband’s employer filed for bankruptcy today, putting him out of a job.
This brings into the open something I’ve been considering for a good year, maybe more. Some of you have heard me talk about it, but I haven’t said anything publicly because, well, public = real. (LJ = real, apparently.) But forming an agreement with my anthropology adviser constitutes pretty real, I’d say, so I might as well bite the bullet and type the words.
I’m leaving graduate school.
Yeah. Um. I have a whole lot to say on this topic, but to spare people’s friends-lists, I’m putting it behind a cut.
To hell with completeness’ sake; I should just institute a rule that I’m never watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ever again, for any reason. Every time I watch the thing, it gets worse — and it’s not like it was good to start with.
First session of ninja_turbo‘s Scion game last night. It’s well-timed; in the week we tackle the subject of race in my spec fic writing class, I find myself playing in the most multiracial, globally diverse set of characters I’ve yet joined in an RPG. Not “diverse” as in “we’ve got an elf and a dwarf and a halfling;” as in, white folks are a minority in this group.
Scion, for those who don’t know, is a game about playing the child of a mortal and a god in the modern world. Several of us decided not to assume that the gods would only stick to their own ethnicity and near neighbors. As a result, we’ve got the Greco-Swedish raised-in-Jersey Scion of Hades, the Greco-Macedonian (!) raised-everywhere Scion of Hermes, the mixed-Native American western drifter Scion of Thunderbird, the half-British half-Japanese Aussie Scion of Susano-o, and my character, whose father is the Aztec god Xipe Totec and whose mother is as mestiza as they come — on one side a Brazilian mix of European and African and Native, on the other side Japanese, because she’s an unrecognized Scion herself, of a Japanese god I have yet to determine.
We worked out backgrounds that had several of our characters running into each other all over the globe, and the whole group came together for the first time in Rio de Janeiro. I fully expect this pattern to continue, since the premise of the campaign is that we’re all ascending to godhood in our own right. And it’s fitting that twenty-first century gods should be global in such fashion.
Also: yay gaming. Haven’t had enough time for that lately.
I intend to pitch another Onyx Court book to my publisher, that would be set in the mid-eighteenth century and form . . . call it bookends, with And Ashes Lie. Either one stands on its own just fine, but they do form a pair.
I’m pondering that story in my off moments, even though it’s Not What I’m Writing Just Now. Come up with an idea. Elaborate the idea. Oooh! It would be fantastic to have Character A do this thing where they tell the guy thus-and-such, ’cause that would put a really nice twist on the idea.
Go away. Do other things. Ponder.
No, wait. Given what happened in MNC, it totally doesn’t make sense for Character A to have those lines. They’d never say ’em. But they’re good lines . . . .
Okay, so invent Character B. Duh.
Keep pondering. While doing other stuff.
So how does Character B get into the story? Who is Character B? (A problem for next book, dear . . . .)
No, no. A problem for this book. Because it would be so much better if Character B were a side person in AAL, and then became more important in the next one.
Ooh, good! Let’s remember that.
Ponder some more.
AHA! Yessss, my precious. Introduce Character B when Thing X happens. It illustrates that thing we wanted to do after MNC, and puts them on the board before their big important moment in the next book and stuff for the Victorian one, too! and oh yes this will do nicely.
Series writing is a new thing to me. Doppelganger got slightly revised to better support its sequel, and I’ve constructed a few closed-trilogy ideas, but this is the first time I’ve really gotten down into the guts of something conceived of as interlocking pieces, rather than as sections of a whole. Apparently this is how it works: your brain ricochets back and forth between different parts like the victim of a pinball machine, but every so often you hit something and rack up a few points, and then if you’re really lucky lights start flashing and bells start ringing (and then be sure your ball doesn’t slip past you out the bottom . . . .)
Pinball: my newest weird writing metaphor.
This just in: the Science Fiction Book Club has picked up Midnight Never Come as a “Main Selection” for June! (Er, I assume that’s June of this year. But checking the e-mail, it actually says “a June catelog,” so who knows — maybe it’s June 3185.)
A peek behind the business curtain: the money from this gets funneled through my publisher (since they’re the ones who licensed that sub-right). Which means I’m suddenly a leap closer to earning out the advance for MNC . . . and the book isn’t even out yet! My pie-in-the-sky dream is to earn out by the end of the first royalty accounting period, but since it hits the shelves June 9th and the period ends June 30th, that pie is pretty far up there. This sale just brought it down by a couple thousand feet. I may just make it after all . . . .
Your tidbit for today: photographs from my research trip to London last year. You can start here, or browse the entire set.
It’s an oddly-balanced set of pictures, for several reasons. First and foremost, I can’t take pictures of 99% of the stuff in the novel because it isn’t there anymore. The best I could do was to photograph some stuff like what was there. But that got hampered by the restrictions against photography inside Hampton Court Palace and Hardwick Hall; those were some of the most informative places I went, but I have very little to show from them. Finally, I also took a great many pictures I didn’t upload, but they’re reference shots from inside museum exhibits, and between the lighting conditions and the necessity of photographing through glass, most of them came out very poor-quality. So my apologies for the odd skew of the set. But those of you who have never been to London will at least have a few mental images now.
*** *** *** *** ***
My publicist wrote to tell me the other day that [redacted: I think I was not supposed to report this yet. But it had to do with a review.] It turns out that isn’t the first review of the book, though. I got myself listed on LibraryThing as an author, and in exploring the links I discovered that two people have already reviewed it. One mixed-to-positive (according to that individual’s allocation of stars), one overwhelmingly positive. And then d_aulnoy‘s ICFA con report includes her reaction; she grabbed the book in ARC while she was there.
Seventy days to street date. It’s finally starting to feel like the book is on its way.
Remarkably effective: Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less. Worth it just for the mental image of Albert Einstein saying “Feh. Read this and weep.” And it manages to be a pretty lucid explanation of Relativity, though there are definitely points where you can see the author struggling to get around some ordinary word that happens to be five or six letters long. (It reminded me a bit of “Uncleftish Beholding”, Poul Anderson’s discussion of atomic theory in Ander-Saxon — that is to say, English purged of all non-Germanic words. That one’s way harder to process, but it’s eye-opening as to how many technical words we’ve borrowed from Latin and Greek.)
More on the funny side: the reason why we never hear about time travelers changing history. One of those bits of parody that would have been inconceivable ten years ago, but painfully, painfully plausible now. (Via my brother, from the online magazine Abyss & Apex.)
I thought I had a third amusing link, but it seems to have gone away. Here, have a detailed explanation of what goes on in a routine autopsy instead. ‘Cause that’s a barrel of laughs.
Man, the last time I was having aneurysms like this over a copy-edit, it was because somebody was going after my semicolons. Now it’s my commas, which I sprinkle liberally throughout my writing, in defiance of the rules of grammar but service to the flow and pacing of a sentence.
I’m literally having bargaining sessions with myself. “If you let him delete the comma in that sentence, you can fight back for the pair in this one. Come on. It’s okay. Do you know how many of your readers will notice the presence or lack of a comma there? NONE.”
But I’m a reader! And I notice! the little voice cries back.
Step away from the commas, honey. Save your energy for dying upon the hill of I Want Those To Be A Compound Sentence, Dammit, Not Two Separate Sentences.
It’s pathetic but true: writers do spend their time and energy obsessing about such things.
Apparently some of Joyce’s family found my post, and I have been told there is an error in it.
I foolishly neglected, in my account of the révérence, to mention the curtsy to the Royal Box.
I mean, how could I have overlooked such a vital part of the process? Shame on me. One must never forget one’s curtsy to the royalty who are surely in attendence.
My most heartfelt apologies for the oversight. <g>
Partway through reading this book, it occurred to me that reading a heavy-duty academic historical analysis of the causes of the English Revolution might not be the brightest idea for someone who hasn’t yet gotten a firm grasp on, oh, the chronology of the English Revolution.
I made it through, though, in large part because of the organization and focus of this book. Stone divides his causes up into three (admittedly fuzzy) categories of preconditions, precipitants, and triggers, each operating on a successively shorter time scale. The preconditions occupied the bulk of that essay (there are four essays in here, but the titular one is huge), and the preconditions, in his view, ran from about 1529 to 1629. In other words, from the Reformation in England and Henry VIII’s seizure of Church property to the dissolution of Parliament and beginning of Personal Rule/the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. That latter term is a new one by me — see the above statement about not really knowing the seventeenth century yet — but the Tudor parts of the preconditions, I can deal with just fine. So when Stone talked about how the redistribution of Church property changed the balance of economic and political power among the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the gentry, or how early Elizabethan neglect of the episcopacy led to a loss of status for Anglican bishops, I can follow him well enough. And I can definitely see how the policies that kept Elizabeth afloat left James in a nigh-untenable position.
The precipitants and the triggers, respectively, he links to the periods 1629-1639 and 1640-1642. That is to say, he’s looking at long-range, middle-range, and short-range causes. And writing from a perspective shortly after sociology apparently rammed into history at high speed, so he’s attempting the admittedly difficult hat trick of bringing in causes from Parliament and the monarchy and the merchants in London and the Puritans everywhere and the Church and the wars England was fighting and social mobility and anything else you can think of. The result? Is a hella dense book. (And regrettably saturated with the passive voice.) But a good one nonetheless, that goes a long way toward making sure I don’t leap straight from 1590 to 1640 or whenever AAL will start, without thinking through the intervening decades.
***
If the structural difficulty with MNC was deciding what year to place it in (since the changeover of interesting historical personnel was so high in the decade to either side), the structural difficulty here is how not to smear this book across forty years or more, to the point where it gets way too distant and boring. There are two ways I can see to do that. One is to turn it into the sort of 300,000-word historical brick that comes with free complimentary LOLcat caption saying “I R SERIOUS BOOK” . . . but that, alas, is not what we’re after here.
The other, of course, is to give up on covering everything happening in that forty years, and to find the perfect turning moments to show more closely. (And probably to pull in the edges. But I honestly don’t think I can reduce this to less than twenty-six years — from the reconvening of Parliament in 1640 to the Great Fire in 1666.) Picking the turning moments, naturally, is far easier said than done.
But the next step in that is probably, y’know, learning what went on in the seventeenth century. It isn’t a good sign when I’m reading this book going, “what happened in 1640? What are you talking about? Huh? The government collapsed? What the hell?”
Time to go find myself a more basic chronological history. Any suggestions?
Since I mentioned fouettés, I should share the infamous Black Swan Coda from Swan Lake, probably the most well-known of all instances of the thirty-two fouettés.
She was a prima ballerina, in her carriage and sense of the dramatic. Not to say that she was a drama queen — she had a lovely sense of humour and a generous heart — but everything I know about florid overdone stage bows, I learned from that woman. Révérence, the curtsy that traditionally ends a ballet class, was a grand affair with her, as you made your bows to the audience, those in the center, those stage left, those stage right, those poor souls up in the balcony who spent their hard-earned savings on tickets to see art, a gesture to the conductor, the gracious acceptance of flowers from the younger girl who ran out on stage to give them to you, breaking off a bud to present to your partner — it could go on for minutes at a time.
Many teachers turn a blind eye or actively encourage their students in anorexic behavior, eternally pursuing the insanely thin body now considered desirable in classical ballet. When a fellow dancer my age kept talking about how she needed to lose five more pounds, Joyce and her daughter Lyndette took her aside and told her point-blank she needed to gain weight — that she would dance better with a healthy body than a skinny one.
Joyce and Lyndette kept me in ballet for another seven years after I had left my old studio with the intention of quitting entirely.
And after I graduated from high school, after I went away to college, I would come back and attend the daytime adult class my mother had started taking. I still do. And I remember one incident particularly, that encapsulates the kind of teacher Joyce was.
I had only just mastered the fouetté before I stopped dancing regularly, but I had always loved it. After the adult class ended, when everyone else was heading for the dressing room, I would go into the center of the floor, start myself with a pirouette, and then do fouettés until I fell off my leg. Which generally took only three or four turns at best, because I was never on my center enough to stay up.
One day, after Joyce watched me do this for a few moments, she told me that I was turning my palms down when I opened my arms. “You’ve got to turn them up,” she said.
The direction of my palms was the least of my problems; I just didn’t have the glutes any more to keep my working leg high enough, not to mention I’d always been crap at spotting and now my hair was long enough that I had to keep it in a braid instead of a bun, which shot my center all to hell. But whatever.
Fifth position. Tendu, place, pirouette —
Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam. Bam.
Oh, I fell off my leg eventually. But I was on, three hundred percent better than I’d been before she made the comment about my hands.
Lyndette’s the one who broke me of the atrocious habits left by the neglect of my old studio. I owe my still-excellent feet to her. Joyce, though, had that special gift for seeing the one tiny thing you never thought had anything to do with your problems, but in truth was the key to them. Palms down took my energy into the ground; palms up centered me, straightened my spine, lifted my ribcage, and brought everything into line.
She was an inspired teacher and a wonderful woman. She fought off breast cancer twice, encephalitis, countless other health problems that would have dropped a lesser woman ten times over. I don’t know how old she was when she died today — it used to be that even her daughter did not know — and I’m sad for the way her health and mind deteriorated after she could no longer teach even the adult class. Ballet was her life, and when it went away, so did she. But I will always tell the story of the day she turned my palms up and made it all work, and I will always remember her with love.
