I am (not so) mighty; hear me roar

Back to the gym today, for the first time in . . . a while. Man, I’ve been really bad about it, this last month or two.

Interesting article, snurched from Neil Gaiman, regarding the genesis of the notion that fat is bad for you. As he says, the most interesting thing about it is the insight into how people think and behave — the whole “informational cascade” thing. The actual discussion of nutrition is less compelling to me, except inasmuch as it helps me not flip out about what I’m eating. On the whole, my views on the matter remain unchanged: I figure I should eat more whole grains and more vegetables, and think twice about dessert.

And, of course, exercise. Hence going back today. I haven’t slipped as much as I feared, which is good. But I can tell I’ve gotten softer around the middle — all that candy and rich food will, indeed, get to you.

But I’d still rather focus on working out than what I’m eating.

Interview me!

So, here’s the deal. My publisher wants to include an interview with me at the back of Midnight Never Come, and I’ve been give the go-ahead to let the interviewer in question be you, Gentle Readers.

They’re looking for me to answer 7-10 questions about writing in general and Midnight Never Come in specific. I figure I’ll solicit questions from everyone, pick out the most popular and/or the most interesting, and send those in; the ones I don’t answer for the book, I may well post on my website as a bonus.

So post your questions in comments! Try to keep it writing- and/or this-book-related (no questions about my secret life as a Cambodian mortuary-worker-turned-spy), and try to post it by next Wednesday (the 17th) at the latest. (I need to send my responses to Orbit by the 19th.)

Here we go . . . .

Updated to clarify: Feel free to ask more than one question, and to repeat other people’s questions (since that’s how I’ll judge the popularity of a given topic).

hello, brain, my old friend

We’re up to 442 words on “How Heroes Fall” (its other possible title). Which doesn’t sound like a lot, but since this will consist of a bunch of vignettes around a theme, it’s a decent amount; it’s two vignettes out of some unknown total — maybe eight or ten.

This is, without a doubt, the most artsy-fartsy piece of crap I’ve ever written. My one hope is to make it good enough to remove “crap” from that equation. (Ain’t nothing gonna redeem it from artsy-fartsy-hood.)

I had all three of my e-mail accounts down to thirty e-mails or less when I went to bed last night; they’ve bounced up a bit since then, but not much. The fact that ninety unanswered e-mails counts as brag-worthy progress tells you what state they were in before.

I’m in a weird state right now. Not enough motivation to get anything done, but enough brain to want to get something done. Can’t figure out what to do with myself. Answer e-mails? Grade? Those would be useful. Write? Read? Watch something? Those would be entertaining. Clean up the house? I really ought to. But I can’t settle down to anything, it seems.

Meh. Stupid temperature dropping like a rock. We skipped right over the first two stages of fall, it looks like, and went straight to grey and dismal.

more help needed

Nearly a month ago, I posted soliciting suggestions for readings I could use in a course proposal I’m putting together. With the wedding and mini-moon in my wake, the time has come for me to revisit this, and put the finishing touches on it.

anima_mecanique and intertext came the closest to guessing the course topic: historical fantasy. Specifically, I’m choosing out seven novels set in various historical periods around the world, all of them more in the vein of “real history with magic slipped in” rather than “alternate history.” (Which is why His Majesty’s Dragon is not on the list.) The six I’ve chosen for sure so far are:

  • Euryale, Kara Dalkey (Republican Rome)
  • Sky Knife, Marella Sands (Classic Maya)
  • The Fox Woman, Kij Johnson (Heian Japan)
  • Ink and Steel, Elizabeth Bear (Elizabethan England)
  • On Stranger Tides, Tim Powers (Caribbean piracy)
  • Territory, Emma Bull (Old West)

I need one more to start the course off with, something set in human prehistory. Clan of the Cave Bear was the first thing that came to mind, but I’ve never read it myself, and I’m not sure it has what I need. So: can anybody recommend a novel of “prehistoric fiction” that includes fantastical elements as literally true? I know Reindeer Moon by Elizabeth Marshall does, but I was underwhelmed by that book; I’d like to begin with something really good.

Also, I need nonfiction readings. (I’ll put those requests behind a cut so they don’t take up too much space.)

(more…)

I’m back. (What’s left of me.)

So, I got married. And then I went to Vegas. (With a pause in there to teach two more days of class; I couldn’t just cancel a whole week.) Now I’m home.

Very, very glad to be home.

I’m trying to recover enough brain to deal with the backlog of e-mail that has built up over the last month or more. Most of the truly crucial stuff has been dealt with as it happened — I hope — but there’s a lot of non-crucial stuff owing. If any of that stuff involves you, Dear Readers, then please bear with me as I try to wade through it. Cerberus (my collection of three e-mail accounts) has grown a fine new set of teeth on all of its heads; dealing with those will take a little while.

In the meantime, I’m enjoying my return from the land of Flashing! Lights! and Brightly! Colored! Things! and did we mention the Obnoxious! Noises! The shows we saw (Penn & Teller, and Cirque du Soleil’s Kà and Mystere) were fabulous, but right about now, I’m taking deep pleasure in reading unmoving black text on a white page. And even writing a bit of my own; one of the flash vignettes that will make up the story “How They Fall” (if that ends up being its title) got scribbled down during my office hours today. I have hope this signals the return of my brain. It’s been missing for several weeks now; I’d love to see it again.

Given my limited time for reading, I’m often well behind the bestseller bandwagon, reading a book loooong after it made its big splash. So hop into the Wayback Machine with me, return to those days (whenever they were) that The Lies of Locke Lamora came out, and pretend I’m not horribly behind the times.

Y’all were right. It is a very good book: full of plot, fairly intricate and exciting, and Lynch does a good job of writing con artist characters whose cons are legitimately interesting. I liked it a lot.

I wish I didn’t have one big flaming problem with it.

But I’m afraid I do, and I started to notice it early on. We were 93 pages in (mass-market) before the first female character appeared, and I think another hundred or so before the next one showed up. In the entirety of that 719-page book, there were precisely two women who, in my opinion, had any real significance to the story.

I gave up on Sabetha appearing about halfway through; apparently she’s a surprise Lynch is saving for later books. I was disappointed with the end of Nazca’s involvement with the plot. After a while I stopped keeping mental count, but I’d estimate that maybe a third of the speaking roles in the novel belong to women, and most of them are minor, throwaway characters: the chandler they conned out of candles, the guard at the hanging, one of the random garristas among about half a dozen in a particular scene. Etc.

It’s all the odder because the setting, which most closely resembles a fantastic Venice, does not borrow the gender politics of such a time and place. Lynch does a laudable job of establishing that there are both men and women among the thieves, sailors, guards, alchemists, clergy, people in paintings, whatever; women apparently have the freedom to follow a variety of professions, as their intellect and physical capacity suit them. But when it’s time for those thieves, sailors, and so on to speak up and do things . . . .

My best guess is that his brain just defaults to “male” when inventing characters. Sofia and Doña Vorchenza both prove that Lynch can write interesting, intelligent women with a real influence on the story. It might just be that he needs to monitor himself more closely on this, and prod himself out of his defaults. Bug could have been female; Sabetha’s existence at least proves one can be a female “Gentleman Bastard.” Or Master Ibelin. Or the Falconer. I suspect this would be a relatively easy problem for Lynch to fix — I just hope he does so. Because it’s annoying to be distracted from my enjoyment of an otherwise good story by the relative absence of half the human race.

Is the sequel out yet? Has anybody read it? Is there progress in the right direction?

radio silence starts

Not like I haven’t been under a pretty thorough radio silence lately anyway, just with being insanely busy. But in half an hour I’m going to be kidnapped for the start of my bachelorette party, and then there are rehearsals and dinners and the whole gettin’ hitched thing.

When you hear from me again, I will be married.

(Assuming all goes according to plan.)

the research shelf

Brief challenge: can anybody make me a better icon out of the book cover? This one doesn’t shrink terribly well, but I lack the skills to do anything fancier with it. (The font used for the title is AquilineTwo, available for free online.)

Anyway, the real point of this post is something I’ve been meaning to do for a while. With the revisions done and out the door, I’ve decided it’s time to officially dismantle my research shelf — the bookcase where I’ve been keeping all my MNC-related books since April or so. They’re all dispersed back to their usual sections, now. But I took a photo a month ago, to record for posterity what it looked like:

The notebooks on the bottom are unrelated, but everything else is there for the novel. (Well, not the fountain.) Faerie lore on the left of the middle shelf, assorted library books on the right; on the upper shelf, it’s roughly organized by general Renaissance, London, biographies, espionage, and then a few isolates like a book on the Reformation, and a few pieces of period literature. That giant thing in the stack on top is the dissertation Dr. William Tighe mailed to me, one of the few scholarly works in existence that discusses the Gentlemen Pensioners in any detail.

Not everything I used is there. I think my Agas map book is missing, as are The Book of the Courtier, The Prince, and the complete poetic works of Sir Philip Sidney, which I pillaged in my search for epigraphs. I do not claim to have read everything on that shelf in its entirety. There’s almost nothing there, however, that I didn’t at least try.

It could have been a lot more. That’s the terrifying part.

But it’s dismantled now, and I’m finding out just how massively certain sections of my library (like “London” and “faerie lore”) have grown. Rearranging books is an activity that makes me oddly happy, though, so it was a pleasant task for a sunny Friday afternoon.

best books and best books

Well, that’s it. I’m done with the revisions on Midnight Never Come, and I must say I’m rather pleased with the state of the book. Which sparked me to ponder the difference between “the best book it can be” and “the best book I can write.”

Most of what I do is the former. This is the latter.

Let me put it in metaphorical terms first. You know that height is determined by both genetics and nutrition, right? As in, your genes allow for you to be a range of possible heights, but your nutrition will determine where in that range you fall. (Broadly speaking. I need the metaphor, not the biological specifics.) Well, most of the time what I’m doing is feeding my books all the nutrition (effort) I can give them, so they reach their full potential in terms of growth (or rather, quality.)

I think of it this way because my ideas tend to come out of my subconscious, and are inflexible to a certain degree. They are what they are, and if I care about them enough I will write them, but that doesn’t guarantee that every one is a groundbreaking new leap forward in my skill. There will always be some development — I never want to coast — but I can’t necessarily take an idea that’s capable of being five foot nine and make it six foot just because. I make them the best books they can be, given the ideas they’re built on. If there are flaws, weak points, it’s a problem in the foundation; the only way I can do better is to write a different book.

Midnight Never Come has eaten everything I’ve thrown at it, and asked for more. I can’t feed it enough to make it hit its full potential. It is the fourteen-year-old-boy of novels.

It’s close to being as good as it can be. I can tell. There are very few places in the book where I look at it and think, man, that could punch the reader just a little bit harder — but there are a few. And those places exist, not because I haven’t put in the effort to fix them, not because the foundational ideas aren’t strong enough, but because I simply don’t have it in me to squeeze out those last few drops of awesome. This not quite the best book it is capable of being, but it is the best book I am capable of writing.

When I wrote Warrior and Witch (to pick one example), I deliberately tried to work on a bigger political canvas. That was the major challenge of that book. This book? The political canvas got bigger again. And there are more pieces on my mental chessboard. And the embroidery of its description and style is more intricate. And a whole lot of other metaphors I could toss in there, which boil down to: I’m pushing myself everywhere. I can’t think of a single major aspect of the book that isn’t bigger and better than what I’ve tried before.

You could say, shouldn’t that be true of every book? In theory. But the truth of the matter is, my brain doesn’t cough up ideas that advanced on a regular basis. Most of them push me on one front; some push me on more. Which is fine, really, because working selectively on different aspects of my writing make leaps like this one possible. If I sat around waiting only for the truly record-breaking ideas, I’d never come up with them, or be capable of tackling them if I did.

But it’s odd to look at a book and think, this truly is the best I can do. And not have it be a negative statement (c’mon, is that the best you got? pfff), but a positive one.

<ponders> I’m not sure this post conveys what’s in my head. It feels like this reflects badly on most of the other books I’ve written, and I don’t mean for it to do that. I promise, I don’t slack on any of them.

Maybe what I should say is: most of my books are the best I can do with my ideas, while this book is the best my ideas can do with me.

cover!

Final version, or at least final enough that I’m allowed to post it.

A few notes. First of all, this is the kind of cover that will look much better in print than on the screen, because as I found out the hard way, the details depend heavily on your monitor settings. If you can’t see the building in the background, you aren’t really getting it all. (Yes, there’s a building in the background. I promise. I didn’t see it until I tried a different computer.)

Second, there are two details that can’t be conveyed in an image. The title will be printed in silver foil, and the floral pattern winding through will be done in a spot gloss on an otherwise matte cover. Or at least that’s the current plan.

I’m quite pleased with it. Authorial nitpickiness aside (there’s always authorial nitpickiness), it’s a nice, elegant cover, and I like their choice of a pull-quote for the top; that’s a line from a John Dowland song I found just as I was doing revisions back in August. I’ll leave it as a closing note:

“Time stands still with gazing on her face,
stand still and gaze for minutes, houres and yeares, to her giue place:
All other things shall change, but shee remains the same,
till heauens changed haue their course & time hath lost his name.”

in memoriam

I ended up feeling a lot quieter after I heard about Robert Jordan than I would have predicted I would.

Here’s what it boils down to, and why I don’t feel bad that my thoughts more or less immediately went to his unfinished book.

I never met the man. I saw him at World Fantasy once, but didn’t stand in the enormous line of people with wheeled carts full of eggcrates full of books for him to sign. I didn’t know him personally. All I knew were his books, and the occasional interview or blog post I came across.

The Eye of the World was the one book I took with me to Costa Rica. I took it because it was big and thick and looked like it might keep me busy through two and a half weeks of semi-rough living where I had to carry all my worldly possessions in a backpack for the duration (and I was a scrawny fourteen at the time). I left that book in Costa Rica after I finished it because the series didn’t grab me then (and see above about having to carry everything); later I went back, because my friends were reading it, and then it did grab me.

I know a lot of people got fed up with the Wheel of Time at one point or another, and I’ll cop to having my own problems with it. But ultimately? The core of the story was something I never stopped being interested in. Through all the subplots and complications and so on, I always was curious to see how the main stuff was going to wrap up. That was my connection to Robert Jordan: the story he was telling.

In a sense, then, the end of that story will be the end of my relationship with the man. Whether it ends here, incomplete, or whether they find someone to finish his work . . . either way, that’s how my connection ends. And I know which one I would prefer.

So I don’t feel bad that I’m wondering what will happen with the last book.

My sympathies, of course, are with everyone who did know him — the people who have lost James Oliver Rigney, Jr., instead of Robert Jordan. I don’t expect them to deal with this question any time soon. There are more important things for them right now.

Robert Jordan’s dead.

As they said on Making Light, where I read the announcement, now isn’t the time to hash out what you think about his books, good or bad.

But I can’t help but wonder what they’re going to do about them.

SF Novelists blogging

I forgot to mention it last month (bad Swan, bad), but I’m one of the contributors to the SF Novelists group blog. The sixteenth of the month is my day to post, so today, it’s a ramble on respecting history — that is, writing historical fiction while being respectful to the real people of the time.

In other news, I’m sick. Better now, thirteen days before the wedding, than some time next week, right? Right?

soliciting readings

Here’s the deal: course proposals to teach at Collins have to be turned in stupidly early. As in, by October 19th, I need a complete syllabus, including readings broken down by week, assignments, grading system, and everything else. And since I have a variety of other things between me an October 19th, I’m going to bootstrap myself through this process a bit by soliciting help; otherwise this hunt would take way too long.

I need suggestions for small (i.e. article- or chapter-sized), reasonably scholarly nonfiction readings on certain topics, as follows:

  • hard/soft primitivism
  • the place of women in republic-era Rome
  • western views of Far Eastern/Japanese history and culture
    (would Said’s Orientalism work for that? I know he’s more writing about the Middle East)

  • the American frontier, esp. the interaction of diversity there
  • current theories on how we perceive and use history
  • the performance of gender/sexuality in Elizabethan England
  • the intersection of religious, political, and secular life in the Renaissance
  • eighteenth-century piracy in the Caribbean
  • events leading up to the O.K. Corral gunfight (not the events of the day itself)

Bonus points if you can figure out what my course topic is, based on this eclectic set of needs. <g>

where did it go?

I believe I loaned someone my photocopy of the “Fantasy as Mode, Genre, Formula” chapter of Brian Attebery’s book at some point. prosewitch, was that you? Or someone else? I kind of need it back.